Actually, in usually *is* the fault of your code. 500 is the servers way of saying "I didn't do it and I'm ok". If something goes wrong and the server knows what, it'll be more specific than returning a 500. But if it calls program, and the program dies (be it because it cannot be compiled, exits unexpectedly, doesn't generate any output, something else), then the server throws you a 500. It usually doesn't know what happened, and if it would know, it wouldn't tell you.