3 ms·

Right now it's just "Operation failed with unexpected error." and emails with invitations seem to be broken (either not sent or miss some important parts).

wkat4242 3y ago
MS is so bad with error messages these days. "Oops something went wrong" and a "funny" picture of a dropped ice cream cone. Just tell me what is actually happening.
- placesalt 3y ago
  I find those cutesy error messages just make a bad situation worse. Error descriptions are probably too much to ask these days - I would bet they'd be perceived as intimidating by the UX group, given that the same group seems to prefer a level of discourse appropriate for grade-school classrooms. A error code would be wonderful, though, since it would be a nice unique search term. It could be put in small greyed-out text in a bottom corner, too, to make everyone happy.
- tialaramex 3y ago
  One thing that keeps surprising me, even though it shouldn't by now, is how reluctant people are to learn from experience. Rust's community got huge benefits out of work to improve the error messages from its compiler and tooling, but we didn't see a lot of real effort to mimic that even in other programming languages, let alone the wider tool ecosystem. A few people, here and there, put in some effort, but nothing at scale. For Rust this work was imperative because their slogan is "A language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software" not "A language with terrible error messages that only nerds can handle" so I'm not surprised other people weren't doing this before Rust showed how much difference it makes, but I was surprised they didn't learn from that.
drcongo 3y ago
"Operation failed with unexpected error" is a fantastic military mission codename.
- tialaramex 3y ago
  I wonder if - when the staffer wrote up a proposed mission and named it "Failed with unexpected error" as the placeholder codename - that would make politicians reconsider or they'd just rename it "Triumphant Awesomeness" or whatever instad of "Failed with unexpected error" and carry on anyway.

wkat4242 3y ago

MS is so bad with error messages these days. "Oops something went wrong" and a "funny" picture of a dropped ice cream cone. Just tell me what is actually happening.

placesalt 3y ago
I find those cutesy error messages just make a bad situation worse. Error descriptions are probably too much to ask these days - I would bet they'd be perceived as intimidating by the UX group, given that the same group seems to prefer a level of discourse appropriate for grade-school classrooms. A error code would be wonderful, though, since it would be a nice unique search term. It could be put in small greyed-out text in a bottom corner, too, to make everyone happy.
tialaramex 3y ago
One thing that keeps surprising me, even though it shouldn't by now, is how reluctant people are to learn from experience. Rust's community got huge benefits out of work to improve the error messages from its compiler and tooling, but we didn't see a lot of real effort to mimic that even in other programming languages, let alone the wider tool ecosystem. A few people, here and there, put in some effort, but nothing at scale. For Rust this work was imperative because their slogan is "A language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software" not "A language with terrible error messages that only nerds can handle" so I'm not surprised other people weren't doing this before Rust showed how much difference it makes, but I was surprised they didn't learn from that.

drcongo 3y ago

"Operation failed with unexpected error" is a fantastic military mission codename.

tialaramex 3y ago
I wonder if - when the staffer wrote up a proposed mission and named it "Failed with unexpected error" as the placeholder codename - that would make politicians reconsider or they'd just rename it "Triumphant Awesomeness" or whatever instad of "Failed with unexpected error" and carry on anyway.