I have copied-and-pasted the strangest of kernel errors, compiler errors, god-knows-what-obscure-tool errors, etc. over the past 20+ years into search engines and have almost always been delighted and amazed at how somehow someone somewhere at some point in time had not only encountered the same thing but actually wrote a description of possible root causes and potential solutions that often unstuck me right away. The success of a site like stackoverflow is exactly this.
It turns out that if you actually do take the time to report the error, no matter how obscure it is, someone in a dark corner of the internet will spend enough time on it that they'll even see fit to document it for others to help their own selves out. And given that, per my initial post, nobody is smart enough to understand how the computer system/software they're creating is going to work under all circumstances, providing error verbosity is sometimes the most empowering thing you can give to your users.
I call it "Somebody Else Has Had This Problem". It's a heuristic that became useful starting about twenty years ago, eh? Before the internet you had to have (and write) fairly complete manuals for software, now you put the error message into a search engine and, hopefully, amortize the suffering.
However, I suspect this has also made it easier to write and (kinda sorta) maintain larger and more complex systems. Like the phenomenon where you widen a road to ease traffic congestion and it works for a while but then encourages more traffic. The reduced cost of creating and maintaining complexity may have encouraged it overall.
- - - -
As an aside, can I quote you, like, on my blog?
> in my line of work I have to be able to walk engineers I work with from the gate-level silicon all the way up to cloud and AI. Without any false modesty, I think I have a fairly good idea of how modern computer architecture works. Yet, I will be the first to tell you that I have no idea how any of these systems work in full. In fact, no one does. Not the best of kernel developers nor the best of chip designers. To claim that you can somehow inventory every possible problem in a computerized system and then provide a graceful exit from that or useful info is either ignorant or arrogant or both.
That's an interesting take. Thanks for sharing. Sure, I can definitely see the "google this error" effect as having permitted a higher degree of complexity. Or, maybe to be more accurate, lowered the barrier to entry to create more complex systems. There are probably pros/cons to this. It takes less sophistication to build something very complex, thereby democratizing the ability of building sophisticated systems/services, but it also means there are many more complex systems out than there is a community of people who have a more-or-less "good" understanding of what they do and, possibly, whose overall behaviour is likely only partially understood by their own designers. Cue in all sorts of security implications, etc. Food for thought.
I don't mind the quoting, but, just in terms of mental hygiene, I generally dislike posting unequivocal opinions on the internet ... because it's often come back to bite me ;) I'm especially skeptical of my own writing when I use labels such as "ignorant" or "arrogant". So long as you understand that I don't take myself very seriously, I mostly stand by that quote you mention.
It turns out that if you actually do take the time to report the error, no matter how obscure it is, someone in a dark corner of the internet will spend enough time on it that they'll even see fit to document it for others to help their own selves out. And given that, per my initial post, nobody is smart enough to understand how the computer system/software they're creating is going to work under all circumstances, providing error verbosity is sometimes the most empowering thing you can give to your users.