Post #2798944
2025-06-08 00:22 UTC
@dvandal@infosec.exchange @davidgerard@circumstances.run that vagueness and especially unwillingness/inability to read error messages is something i had to shake out of people when i was tutoring a first year university programming course - the fact that new programmers are going to never even learn that because they'll just make GPT read and sort out the error is frankly terrifying. Reading error messages is, in my opinion, probably the single most critical skill of basically all flavours of computer touching. Everything reports errors when it fails and reading them is the only way you as a user, administrator, developer, whatever, can figure out what's happened and why. The scary red text is your friend.
Replies (1)
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@dvandal@infosec.exchange 2025-06-08 00:44
@yayroos@tech.lgbt @davidgerard@circumstances.run 3000% yeah! Error messages are good and important and not getting comfortable with reading and understanding them will stunt one's career path tremendously. Developers don't just haphazardly write out the error messages to measure how "badly" something failed. They write them out so that someone is able to start the debugging process. The kicker: The error messages he was hitting were messages that *I wrote*, which is part of why I was able to immediately diagnose the problem right off the cuff. (ie: Okay yeah the thing you're passing in is null, did you ever set it? No? go set it to what it's supposed to be then!)