thoughtcrumbs

Software really should be designed for error tracing. I don't want to know the address of where the page fault occurred, but a decent trace of what calls led to the error isn't too much to ask. Debugging is a necessary step in the software development process (see, Professor Young, I really was paying attention!) and if programmers would include human-readable trace dialogues, post-release debugging would occur exponentially faster. As the open-source movement has shown, thousands of lay programmers are out there willing to chip in to improve products. If Macromedia had told me why printing my stage in Director caused a fatal error, I would in turn have reported that back to them, especially if there were a way to do that right from the dialogue box. It's all about the reciprocal love, baby.

Granted, most software users couldn't care less about why errors occurred; but the option to list the error trace in dialogue boxes would make nerds like me happy. My mock dialogue box (below) reveals my ignorance about what actually goes on under the GUI, but you get the idea.