this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2026
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The vast majority of crash reports I've seen are type errors. And not just from dynamic languages, either.
That's a pretty cut-and-dried programming error that could easily be conveyed as such to the user
How would telling the user there’s a type error be helpful at all? If the user isn’t a programmer that would be utterly useless to them. If they are a programmer it’s probably still useless because the probably don’t have the source on hand.
I mean the error should say "Whoever wrote this software made a serious mistake that caused it to crash." That's fairly useful imo.
How is that useful? Because if your answer is “I boycott devs that have type errors”, I got bad news for you. Unless you’re working on mission critical systems, like pace makers, airplanes, spacecraft, financial systems, etc, sinking the necessary engineering time to 100% prevent those kinds of errors is a bad business decision.
An error message should either be instructions for the user, or something they copy-paste into a bug report (or equivalent). That’s it.
not really. to me, the fact that someone made a mistake at some point is kinda implied.