[PurpleRamen]

Comments like this are the reason why I will not touch software like this. I can live with the old school-style and the limited ability set sold on the webpage. But someone bringing up a legit complain and then receiving such hostile behavior, speaks for a toxic community or user hostile developers. And it's not limited to this one comment, but there are several collect here.

[AvieDeckard]

They simply said the information is in the manual, there was no hostile behavior. Please stop punching at shadows.

[zen928]

The replying comment side stepped the discussion of error messages lacking context that could be easily remedied to be identifiable and the response was "it's in the manual". All error messages meant to be understood by humans should be in the manual at minimum, but what the replyer suggested by ignoring the conversation was "your issue with the error message isn't important because you can figure it out yourself". It's dismissive to respond to nuanced articulated opinions made in good faith with simplistic matter-of-fact answers that don't address the problem, which could easily be seen as a form of hostility in a place meant for discussion and engagement.

You could argue that's not their intent or that it's the case of direct wording than intentionally being curt, but this is the second post in the chain that dismisses the legitimate discussion with additional redress to make sure you let the poster know that it's their problem "punching at shadows" and that their problems are imagined. What a shameful display of lacking empathy.

[cess11]

It's not important because there are many quirks to this software, including a Lisp-like programming language. Learning to use it involves internalising many things that aren't common knowledge, which one has to figure out by trial and error, and the manual.

If you are seriously interested in BeeBase you'll be spending hours learning the basics of the Lisp-dialect and GUI toolkit, getting a hangup on that error message means you don't have that kind of interest. Maybe the empathy got in the way of that, I don't know.

And let's say someone makes a patch that implements a new error message that specifies which of the two rules regarding table names has been breached, then what? More complaints about the next quirk? Some other error message? Begging for a Lua-implemented query language because parens lost the syntax wars of yesteryear, describing it as miserable that it isn't already integrated?

[wewtyflakes]

> And let's say someone makes a patch that implements a new error message that specifies which of the two rules regarding table names has been breached, then what? More complaints about the next quirk? Some other error message?

Yes, this is how software development is done, assuming you like your customers.

[cess11]

Who are you referring to? Is it even someone in this thread?

[wewtyflakes]

I was quoting you, using the > sign to refer to what you said directly. I thought the quote was useful to highlight that it can be easy to have a mental disconnect, or even an antagonism, between developers and their stakeholders.

[mynameisvlad]

Yeah there’s a lot of people mistaking bluntness for hostility here.

And, at the end of the day, this is a free open source piece of software. The experience could be improved, definitely, but nobody owes it to anyone to do so and it’s important to remember that as well.