Oren blogs today about Castle Style Errors
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I admit, those are good error messages; someone put some thought into them and that's the most important thing.
These are great messages for developers, but are they as appropriate for the code once it's running in production and being maintained by the operations team? A team that might not be at all familiar with the code or the libraries in use.... Now, I don't know what causes these errors because I haven't encountered them, so these might be fine.
But a lot of times when the exceptions are very developer specific, they can be misleading. It requires a 2nd layer of thought; Why would this be broken in prod?
It's okay if the developer-specific message tags along, but it's important to have any root cause (missing database table,broken db, connection error, etc...) displayed as obviously as possible.
This is why error messages for server-side systems are a pain. It's very hard to get right, since there are multiple audiences. And knowing for certain what the root cause is when you're writing the code tends to be difficult.
Update: Typos fixed and minor reword of a sentence for clarity.
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