this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
332 points (96.4% liked)
Programming
17333 readers
361 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This is a security thing. A descriptive error message is useful for troubleshooting, but an error message that is useful enough can also give away information about architecture (especially if the application uses remote resources). Instead, provide an error code and have the user contact support to look up what the error means, and support can walk the user through troubleshooting without revealing architecture info.
Another reason can be i18n/l10n: Instead of keeping translations for thousands of error messages, you just need to translate "An Error Has Occurred: {errnum}"
Those benefits both make sense, but are those really the original motivation for Microsoft designing the Blue Screen of Death this way? They sound more like retroactive justifications, especially since BSODs were around well before security and internationalization were common concerns.
Linux has something similar, kernel panics. However, with Linux you get useful information dumped on your screen.
Nothing gets logged on Linux either, just like windows and that makes sense. The kernel itself messed up and can't trust its own memory anymore. Writing to disk may cause you to fuck up your disk, so you simply stop everything.
Still though, Linux dumps useful info whereas windows just gives you this dumb useless code.
Not when it's my own computer. My computer needs to give me useful messages.If it's a website then the site MUST log correctly in the log files...
If it's a translation issue then just use English, everyone that can understand logs can (or at least should) understand that