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by Quekid5 812 days ago
... but you do get an error. That's a lot better what you typically get with C or C++. Assuming it's valid systax, of course.

This is a veering off topic, but I do agree that Nix-the-language has a lot of issues.

(You might suggest Guix, but I don't want to faff about with non-supported repositories for table stakes like firmware and such. Maybe Nickel will eventually provide a more pleasant and principled way to define Nix configurations?)
1 comments
nh2 812 days ago
My favourite Nix error message is

    infinite recursion encountered, at undefined position
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vintermann 811 days ago
I tried some kind of BBC micro at a computer museum, and found out that if you had an error anywhere in your BASIC program, it would just print "error". No line number, no hint at what the problem was.
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danudey 811 days ago
I could understand some kind of ancient system not having the detail or knowledge to explain what happened in particular, but this is something that still happens in a lot of Microsoft software in particular.

Outlook has a consistent tendency to give you errors like "Couldn't get your mail for some reason", or Windows saying "Hey networking isn't working". No "connection timed out" or "couldn't get an IP address" or "DNS lookup failed" or any other error message that is possible to diagnose. Even the Windows network troubleshooting wizard (the "let us try to diagnose why things aren't working for you" process) would consistently give me "yeah man idk" results, when the error is that I'm not getting an address from DHCP and should be extremely easy to diagnose.

I get that in a lot of cases, problems cut across lots of errors or areas of responsibility, and getting some other team making some other library to expose their internals to your application might be difficult in an environment like Microsoft, but it's just inexplicable that so much software, even these days, resorts to "nope can't do it" and bail out.

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Quekid5 812 days ago
Haha, reminds me of some Scheme interpreter that would just say something like 'missing paren' at position 0 or EOF depending on where the imbalance was :)

... but, yeah... I'm pretty sure there could be some hints as to whereabouts that infinite recursion was detected.

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