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What are your programming hot takes?
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Programming
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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