In my experience (teaching university students), few of the people who need such an article most would read it, or even go looking for it. Maybe some experienc

In my experience (teaching university students), few of the people who need such an article most would read it, or even go looking for it. Maybe some experienced people might, but most of those will figure it out for themselves. I think most beginner programmers treat every error message as simply "you screwed up", and reading the error message and gleaning useful information from it doesn't occur to them as a possibility. That knowledge can come from it being explained like you suggest (but in person with their actual problem is better), or from them sitting down and puzzling it out. If you haven't been through this though, and don't know what kind of information is available in error messages, you won't go looking for an explanation of how to find it.