[perl4ever]

Something I've never seen recommended - while more information is better up to a point, error messages that are oddly phrased, not uniform with all the others, etc. are kind of a good thing, because they're easier to recognize and search for by a distinctive fragment.

In effect, good writing can have negative returns.

It doesn't happen that often, but sometimes I get frustrated searching for an error that shares its wording with way too many unrelated issues.

[I am thinking more of runtime errors, but still]

[bookofsand]

In the old days errors came with error codes. This helped searchability using an index in a printed manual, but also Google. Unfortunately people are not good at pattern matching random many digits numbers, so this is not very useful in the front line. I wonder if world triplets, possibly semantically meaningful, could be used as error codes of sorts in the compiler error space.