Monday, May 22, 2006

Programming: On Being Verbose

When creating an application, it is important to use descriptive message to inform the user of whats going on. I take this idea from the “Unix Philosophy”. Eric S Raymond spells this out very well in “The Art of Unix Programming”.

The below error message is an example of what not to use as an error message. And to think, the issue that caused this little gem was a permission issue on the application folder. I think in this case, I almost would be better off without an error message at all.

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