this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2026
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Speaking as a software engineer, that's always the goal! In all actuality, though, if the program knew what happened, it could probably self-correct. When you're getting stack traces, it's the computer saying, "I dunno, I can't make head nor tail of this mess, and if I keep going something's going to break, so YOU figure it out." It's not intentionally obfuscated, it's telling you exactly what the problem is from its perspective.
If I gave you directions to meet me at a place you weren't familiar with, but I gave you the wrong directions, when you called me you wouldn't be like, "hey, just so you know, I turned left on 5th Street when I should've turned right." If you knew that, you'd just go back to 5th and turn the other way. You'd call me and say, "so I have no idea where I am. Your directions say to turn left here, but if I do that I'll literally walk into the ocean and I'm pretty sure I see sharks in the water. There's a statue of a sea horse on my right, and I passed a Shake Shack about two blocks back."
That's what a stack trace is. It's supposed to be a message to the developer, not to the user. The developer should get the stack trace and either fix the problem that led to that issue in the first place, or add better error handling so that when it fails the program can tell you in more plain language what to do.
Fantastic explanation
Thank you, you're very kind.