[speedyapoc]

I work on a consumer facing mobile app and have found great success in including a short unique code along with any error messages. This has been helpful to diagnose errors where the same message can appear in a variety of different scenarios, and has significantly improved the user's ability to accurate report errors.

When looking at user complaints, I find that users often report error messages by paraphrasing them. An error message like "XYZ failed to initialize" often ends up being reported as "the app is not initializing" (which naturally could mean a number of things). By modifying this error message to include a code such as "XYZ failed to initialize (CODE-ABCD)", I've found that user behaviour shifts to including the code as opposed to the error message itself. Users instead say things like "I'm receiving CODE-ABCD" which is infinitely more helpful as a developer or consumer facing customer service personnel.

This reminds me of PHP's "T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM" error which, despite being completely unintelligible, was very quick to resolve due to its uniqueness.

[SuperCuber]

As someone who speaks hebrew and doesn't do PHP at all this was very strange to discover :D

[sixstringtheory]

As someone who does neither, this piqued my curiosity!

> in PHP T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM is the token name for ::, the static separator. It’s Hebrew for double colon.

The rest of the article is an interesting read, but I have no background or opinions… it seems the author and others do not agree it is a good [part of an] error message ;)

https://phil.tech/2013/wtf-is-t-paamayim-nekudotayim/