Dept of Utterly Useless Error Messages

[Les Mikesell]

Aaron Konstam wrote:
> I would hate to put some rationality into what is otherwise a great
> discussion, but have any of you tried to create a system of any size
> with useful (that is useful to every user) error messages. It is pretty
> tough.
> 
> This is one of the reasons as Fred Brooks comments in his book "The
> Mythical Man-Month" it takes 9 times as long to create a software system
> that can be used by people in general than a system that only your use.

 From an old fortune cookie file:

"Steinbach's Guideline for Systems Programming: Never test for an error 
condition you don't know how to handle."

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com