[dvtrn]

I’m left wonder at what point does the “give a man a fish/teach a man how to fish” method of pedagogy apply in terms of ‘acting like a human’ in this context?

Asking as someone who otherwise generally agrees that there are some truly poorly written errors and exceptions out there, but has also been on the admittedly frustrating end of the constant requests for help deciphering error messages that were very plainly stating what the problem is for someone who didn’t even try looking for the fishing rod.

[chillfox]

Sure, clearly there are people who will never try, or learn, but in general as an industry I feel like the wast majority of errors are very very far from good.

Few error messages are written well, has good formatting and are self contained (can be used to fix the issue without having to seek further information elsewhere). Sometimes you see errors that contain one of those elements, but rarely all of them.

There has been an effort the last few years improving compiler errors for some languages, but those same improvements have not reached applications.