friendly messages

[Guy Harris]

>The consensus seems to be (correct me if I'm wrong.. :-) that error
>messages should say just enough to please the user and no more.

Yes.  However, one gets the impression that some programmers have a
quite bogus idea of how much this actually is - often bogusly small.  If
I have to dive into the source code to figure out what the problem is,
and then find that it's, say, some straightforward error in a
configuration file, the person who designed the error messages screwed
up.  If I have to "ls" a file to figure out whether the application
couldn't open it because it doesn't exist, or because it's not
readable/writable by me, or because it's on a read-only file system,
or..., the person who designed the error messages screwed up -
especially given that the "open" call will tell you that, so all they
had to do was *not* to throw out the information stashed in "errno"!

>The problem here is (of course) defining the term "user".

And one of the main problems is that they too often define "user" as
"wizard" - or, worse, assume that "the experienced user can" - and
*should* - "figure out what's wrong".  Even wizards sometimes get
*really* ticked off at cryptic error messages; yes, they *can* -
eventually - figure out what the problem is, but they often don't like
playing 20 Questions with the machine in order to do so.

I've been working with UNIX for over 10 years now, and I *still* find
many of its error messages to be quite poor, although they have slowly
gotten better over time - yes, I can poke at enough things and figure
out what the *real* problem is, eventually, but I'd rather *not* be
forced to do so, especially if the computer could have added some extra
bit of information to its messages that would have told me what the real
problem was immediately.

>The same problem exists with the term "user-friendly".  It's not
>possible to lump all users of any commercial computer system into
>a single group with definite and consistent interface preferences.
>This applies to error messages as well as the syntax of a command-line
>interface or whether the system has a command-line at all (e.g. Mac).

The term "user-friendly" doesn't denote very much.  It *con*notes quite
a bit, but the connotation depends on the audience; if it's some bunch
of novices, it's intended to connote Motherhood, Apple Pie, and the
Flag, and if it's some bunch of UNIX hackers, it's often intended to
connote Satan and grape Flavor-Aid.  In the former case, it can be used
to make some not-so-wonderful package sound better than it is, and in
the latter case it can be used to inappropriately dismiss some
reasonable ideas.

In other words, the issue of whether mouse-based user interfaces are
good or bad has a lot less to do with the issue of how noisy an
application might be in the face of errors that is often thought.