The Incredibly Specific Error

January 14th, 2008

Something frequently encountered when using computers is the ubiquitous error message. There are lots of them that are inane, and, indeed, there are sites out there with whole sections devoted to this.

But there’s another peculiar brand of error message: The Incredibly Specific Error. For instance, this java.lang.IllegalArgumentException:

Path does not start with a "/" character.

I could understand if, perhaps, the path as a whole was invalid, or otherwise syntactically incorrect, but in this case, couldn’t the software try just a little harder? Couldn’t it throw the slash on there itself and just kick out a polite warning?

Entry Filed under: Programming