Tag Archives: programming

The problem with complex error messages

Whilst I found myself agreeing with most of Jeff Atwood’s post The Problem With Logging, I strongly disagree with his third point:

If it’s worth saving to a logfile, it’s worth showing in the user interface. This is the paradox: if the information you’re logging is at all valuable, it deserves to be surfaced in the application itself, not buried in an anonymous logfile somewhere. Even if it’s just for administrators. Logfiles are all too often where useful data goes to die, alone, unloved and ignored.

This fails to take into consideration the two very distinct types of error messages that an application should have: administrator focused and user focused. Both of these error messages can be triggered by the same error condition. A problem occurs when you display administrator focused messages to the user: anyone that has come across largely meaningless error codes rather than a friendly human-readable language has experienced this less-than-valuable approach to logging.

useless error mesage

Good error messages are essential to any application, and so are adminstrator focused messages, but let’s remember these are two very distinct features and need to be separated as necessary.

Glen Scott

I’m a freelance software developer with 18 years’ professional experience in web development. I specialise in creating tailor-made, web-based systems that can help your business run like clockwork. I am the Managing Director of Yellow Square Development.

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Real World Lisp

Prompted by a question posed by one of my colleagues today, “has anyone ever used Lisp?”, I surprisingly found myself being the only person that had.

I played around with it many years ago after being inspired by Eric S. Raymond’s seminal article, “How to Become A Hacker” in which he explained that “getting” Lisp is equalivent to finding programming nirvana.

Whilst I didn’t quite reach those levels, I found that using Lisp was a great learning experience. Despite it being half a century old, it is still a relevant language today; the online Practical Common Lisp book contains examples of a spam filter, an ID3 tag parser and other real-world examples.

The following two links are for the curious who might wish to try it out:

Glen Scott

I’m a freelance software developer with 18 years’ professional experience in web development. I specialise in creating tailor-made, web-based systems that can help your business run like clockwork. I am the Managing Director of Yellow Square Development.

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Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it

Wise words taken from a list of programming epigrams from 1982:

Epigrams on Programming

Glen Scott

I’m a freelance software developer with 18 years’ professional experience in web development. I specialise in creating tailor-made, web-based systems that can help your business run like clockwork. I am the Managing Director of Yellow Square Development.

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Singletons and global state

A very useful article from Google’s MiÅ¡ko Hevery about the problems with the Singleton design pattern. Essentially, Singleton’s rely on a global instance variable which could point to any number of other variables, thus creating a global state. This causes problems when you want to test your code.

Glen Scott

I’m a freelance software developer with 18 years’ professional experience in web development. I specialise in creating tailor-made, web-based systems that can help your business run like clockwork. I am the Managing Director of Yellow Square Development.

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“Programmers Wikipedia” Coming Soon

stackoverflow.com is a new project from Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, intended to be “the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit”. Worth keeping an eye on…

Glen Scott

I’m a freelance software developer with 18 years’ professional experience in web development. I specialise in creating tailor-made, web-based systems that can help your business run like clockwork. I am the Managing Director of Yellow Square Development.

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Creator of ELIZA dies

Joe Weizenbaum, the creator of one of the earliest examples of Artificial Intelligence, has died. Weizenbaum created ELIZA, the “virtual therapist”, which I’ve played around with in various implementations over the years. It inspired me to investigate Lisp, so for that reason alone I hold Weizenbaum in high regard.

“A computer will do what you tell it to do, but that may be much different from what you had in mind”

cyclotram: Joe Weizenbaum dead at 85. ELIZA in denial.

Glen Scott

I’m a freelance software developer with 18 years’ professional experience in web development. I specialise in creating tailor-made, web-based systems that can help your business run like clockwork. I am the Managing Director of Yellow Square Development.

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