Let me unpack that for you

[j4]

Another post over there. Not pleased with this one, to be honest; I was rushing to finish it and I don't feel like I said what I was trying to say.

ETA: link fixed -- of course, the date part of it changed because I didn't actually post it till after midnight (FAIL!).

Comments

[ewx.livejournal.com]

At the end of the day, it’s all about communication: the programmer, the software (insofar as it can be regarded as an agent), the user, the IT support guy — they’re all trying to pass information (in the broadest sense) from one agent to another without losing data.

This can be quite a problem even within a single program: if you have several components on top of one another then the error that occurs near the bottom can end up stripped down to nothing more informative than “something went wrong” by the time it reaches the top. (And that's even before a user, perhaps even at the best of times floundering in the deep end, tries to interpret it.)

[crazyscot.livejournal.com]

Bugbear du jour: a filesystem which returns an int on every call but only ever returns one of two constants, FAIL or OK. This is despite calling back to the OS to access the underlying storage device and potentially getting a wide range of error codes because myriad things might have gone wrong. I am loath to add a static int LastError ...

[vatine]

The most amusing of those was the sequence of events that caused (some networked file system or other) to mogrify an initial "permission denied" to "no more space" and a "file system full" to "insufficient permission".

I have thankfully purged the exact details of what happened through the layers, but...