[masklinn]

> Rust was started in 2010, and Elm in 2012.

That doesn’t preclude learning from younger langages in any way.

The trend of providing really helpful and valuable error messages (especially compilation) really started with Evan’s “compilers as assistants” and “compiler errors for humans” from 2015, although there had been forays into improvements to e.g. error localisation from clang.

And Rust’s improvements absolutely come from there, as acknowledged by Jonathan Turner’s 2016 “shape of errors to come”: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2016/08/10/Shape-of-errors-to-com... as well as his “new error format” proposal / rfc which eventually lead to the change: https://github.com/jonathandturner/rust_proposals/blob/maste...

[mulander]

I remember Ada always having very precise and helpful error messages like this one:

literal_string.adb:5:33: warning: wrong length for array of subtype of "Standard.String" defined at line 5 literal_string.adb:5:33: warning: "Constraint_Error" will be raised at run time

then when you run the app it behaves as advertised

$ ./test

raised CONSTRAINT_ERROR : literal_string.adb:5 length check failed

There are many others and when I saw llvm improving error messages for C and C++ (which I saw happening before Rust was a thing) I always thought it was inspired by Ada and it's helpful messages like:

expected private type "<type name>" defined at ...; found type "<type name>" defined at ...

"<name>" is undefined (more references follow); possible misspelling of "<name>"

and the many others that were just there when I first tried Ada around 2008/2009.