[CornCobs]

I actually from a less technical person's perspective, "cute" error messages humanize errors, showing them that there was indeed someone who made that page they are currently on and not just some soulless computer and thus making solving the problem much more approachable!

Example 1: Chrome's dino page is actually great! Grandma doesn't fear it or call me out of panic the moment she sees it. Imagine if she got something like the default Apache 500 error webpage.

Example 2: the new BSOD. I saw on some other thread that some people hate it, but I think it's clear and directs the inexperienced user to what they could at least try to do

Here I was thinking that the very same group of people that think sl is a funny command line program wouldn't appreciate humanized error messages...

[autoexec]

> I actually from a less technical person's perspective, "cute" error messages humanize errors, showing them that there was indeed someone who made that page they are currently on and not just some soulless computer and thus making solving the problem much more approachable!

Yeah, I don't have any problem with "cute" error messages as long as they also contain all the info someone would need to identify the problem and if possible solve it. it's not the "cute" that's the problem really, it's the frustration and the lack of direction that usually comes with them.

[thaumasiotes]

In the python shell, `exit` is a string containing a message to the effect of "You can leave the shell by sending EOF (CTRL-D)".

I've seen HN commenters express extreme outrage over this ("They obviously know what you want to do, so why not just do it?!?!?"), but I love it. The first time I got that message, I considered it incredibly helpful, because sending EOF will work on any tool that reads from standard input, not just python. I hadn't known how to do that before the python shell taught me!

[mrguyorama]

Consider that there is zero reason not to print that line, and exit anyway.