I'm perfectly capable of remembering 3 digits for a short time.

So would I be, if I didn't get interrupted three times on my way from the circ desk to my desk (twenty feet) to fix the problem :-)

Error messages are sent to me by email. The one time per week that someone actually calls, they're always reading it off the screen. Perhaps you code for the internetless?

Close. Think in terms of people who print email and have to disconnect from the internet to use the phone. Also, I said "End Users", so think in terms of people who don't know how to copy and paste. (Really. I've been teaching introductory computer classes twice a month at the library since 2000 and have by doing so significantly increased the number of people in town who copy and paste. Yes, Galion is a fairly technophobic community. People have access to the internet, but they're not comfortable with it.)

Nearly half of the bug reports I get are on sticky notes. Most of the rest are delivered verbally, either in person (this is WAY more common than you would suspect) or on the phone -- and, as noted, almost all of the internet connections around here are dialup, and most people don't have a second line for voice, so they have to disconnect to use the phone. Couple that with an end-user mentality that requires them to "x out of" (i.e., close) the web browser in order to disconnect, and you have a recipe for not being able to remember an error message to give it to me. When I first started this job, vanishingly close to 100% of the bug reports I got were totally useless, along the lines of "it didn't work". Worse, when I started asking them to write down the error message next time and bring it to me, I discovered that they had no idea what to write down and so usually wrote down a non-unique part of the message. (No amount of cajoling can get most end users to write down an _entire_ error message if it has any length to it at all.) An error message like "Grouchy Pickles" will actually _get_ to me, because it sticks in the user's head; then I grep for it, and I know which line the error occurred on, which is more than I was usually able to discover from error reports before I adopted this technique.

If you're writing stuff that gets used mostly by powerusers then you probably won't need this technique.

;$;=sub{$/};@;=map{my($a,$b)=($_,$;);$;=sub{$a.$b->()}} split//,".rekcah lreP rehtona tsuJ";$\=$;[-1]->();print

In reply to Re: Perl Style: About error messges opening files by jonadab
in thread Perl Style: About error messges opening files by demerphq

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