On Tue, 29 Jan 2019 at 14:47, Stephen J. Turnbull <turnbull.stephen...@u.tsukuba.ac.jp> wrote: > I don't disagree. I disagree with the conclusion that it's worth the > effort to try to improve all error messages that confuse new users, > because new users (by definition) don't know enough to respond > usefully in many cases. In those cases, they need to be told what's > going on and why, where more experienced users can figure it out from > their background knowledge of Python semantics. Embedding a "theory > of operations" note in every error message would be possible, but I > don't think it's a good idea -- it would certainly make the language > more annoying for experienced developers.
FWIW, we have pretty decent evidence that error messages don't have to provide a wonderful explanation on their own in order to be helpful: they just need to be distinctive enough that a web search will reliably get you to a page that gives you relevant information. Pre-seeded answers on Stack Overflow are excellent for handling the second half of that approach (see [1] for a specific example). Cheers, Nick. [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25445439/what-does-syntaxerror-missing-parentheses-in-call-to-print-mean-in-python -- Nick Coghlan | ncogh...@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com