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I still recall my father having various error messages from software (browsers, website, Word, etc), and when I'd translate them it was almost always a case of the error message being meaningful to me _but not in those words_, and so when I'd translate them for him he'd ask, "why didn't the error message say THAT?". It still is something I think about occasionally when trying to write logging or error messages -- how we got there, how to fix it, etc.


Can you give an example?


For a long time on Windows, I had to "copy" a complex directory structure, never use "move". A file lock could bork it.

No meaningful indication what file was locked. No meaningful indication what was locking the file. The process simply stopped.

It got much better after Win 8 onwards.




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