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tbhp wrote: ↑23 October 2026, 20:25 Do people seriously believe error messages give relevant information?

If the computer was able to diagnose itself, it would also be able to tell you how to solve the issue. The error message is just a distraction, when in fact it has no clue what is going on.

If I didn't already believe you liked to troll, this would convince me. As you have illustrated more than once, you seem to know very little about software development and diagnosis of bugs. As someone who does this for a living, please stop spouting your ridiculous opinions as facts (and they are stated as that above - you're not indicating this is what you think, which would still be incredibly ignorant, but that error messages/numbers mean nothing).

For those who might care, when you have a complicated workflow, with half a dozen inputs and maybe the same amount of conditions that might affect how those inputs are processed, that leads to a large amount of scenarios where things can go wrong. A GOOD developer, puts in either messages or (less helpfully) error codes that can help a developer figure out why the code behaved in an unexpected way. If used properly, both messages and error codes can lead to faster diagnosis and fixing of a bug.

Computer are machines, they are not magic. A computer runs a piece of software as coded by the developer, it doesn't fix it on the fly. If something goes wrong, it will fail, and hopefully, tell you where and what specifically went wrong at that point. Then it's up to a developer (who can be AI-assisted) to work out how to handle that situation and fix the code. And while AI-assistance is possible and helpful for fixing bugs, it still requires the input of a developer, as sometimes the AI doesn't understand what's happening and suggests improper solutions - either resulting in the wrong outcome for the user of the software, or just not fixing the bug at all. AI is a tool, it is not something you can just let loose on a piece of software and say "please fix all the bugs", since how a bug should be fixed can sometimes be quite nuanced.

tbhp wrote: ↑23 October 2026, 20:25 If the computer was able to diagnose itself, it would also be able to tell you how to solve the issue.

Identifying the problem and solving it are two very different issues.

An error message could very well be something like "Error: probability is negative!" It's now up to the developer to figure out how to fix it. Was the input wrong and not properly filtered? Is there a mistake in some formula? Some edge case was not properly considered?

Besides, it's not "the computer diagnosing itself", it's the developer adding helpful error messages.

nik592 wrote: ↑24 October 2026, 02:20 A GOOD developer, puts in either messages or (less helpfully) error codes that can help a developer figure out why the code behaved in an unexpected way. If used properly, both messages and error codes can lead to faster diagnosis and fixing of a bug.

Is this a place where an "assert" statement (or the equivalent in another language besides Python) helps? I've never been a professional developer, so I don't know if this is used in the real world vs contrived examples to illustrate the concept in coursework.

Meeplelowda wrote: ↑24 October 2026, 09:06

nik592 wrote: ↑24 October 2026, 02:20 A GOOD developer, puts in either messages or (less helpfully) error codes that can help a developer figure out why the code behaved in an unexpected way. If used properly, both messages and error codes can lead to faster diagnosis and fixing of a bug.

Is this a place where an "assert" statement (or the equivalent in another language besides Python) helps? I've never been a professional developer, so I don't know if this is used in the real world vs contrived examples to illustrate the concept in coursework.

That is one way. An assert is a test of expectations before you run some code - so this method(/function) will fail if (for example) the input number is negative, so I'll assert that it's greater than or equal to zero before we even start doing any of the processing. Alternatively, it can be a simple as something like an if statement if the language doesn't support asserts. I'm not as familiar with Python (I primarily work in Java, with some SQL and javascript thrown in, as well as some other bits and pieces), but the other main way is exception handling. So methods can either be written to throw out exceptions when things go wrong, and a lot of common code (eg. in standard java methods), things will throw exceptions. Again, good code will "catch" those exceptions and handle them - which sometimes, that's as simple as logging them so that they can be diagnosed.

Wow. Have I been left behind in programming. I am still making pinball machines in basic programming on my Trs-80 from the 1980s. All you devs at bga are doing an awesome job with the bugs.

I finally could report the bug: #251976

The loading between each action is endless I need to refresh the page every 30 seconds

tbhp wrote: ↑23 October 2026, 20:30 Well they've never helped nor have I ever paid attention to them.

Perhaps these two things are related

Error messages are helpful. When I was learning coding, if my code did not execute properly (or worse, did not even compile), the error code would often lead me directly to the line of code that caused the problem.