Dumb diagnostics

Hey 

How many of you like the  "Something bad happened,   I'm gonna blow away
all your work ... OK?"
messages from PC's  ?      Do you think having a job log to look at is a
thing that makes the AS/400
a little easier to debug or track down problems?

Well Ed is asking for your opinion on this in a new forum.     

http://forums.infoworld.com/threads/get.cgi?76669

John Carr

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Dumb diagnostics

Posted by: siteadm
Date posted: Fri Oct 2 14:49:11 PDT 1998 

              Today's GUI-based, object-oriented programming environments
are
              supposed to make life a little easier for application
developers. But at
              least a few readers feel that's not always the case,
particularly when
they find themselves confronted with a cryptic error message that tells
them only that
they've bombed out without offering any clues about what the problem is. 

"Today I got another of those wonderful Windows error messages," one
veteran systems analyst
recently wrote me. An inscrutable line of gobbledygook was telling him that
there was a bug
somewhere in 400 lines of C code and that he should click "OK" to
acknowledge that the message
was the extent of the diagnostic help he was going to get. "No, it is not
'OK.' I have to fix this, and to
do that I need to know what is wrong," he complained. 

The frequency with which he finds himself in such situations makes the
systems analyst hearken back
to the pre-GUI days of purportedly less programmer-friendly environments. 

"At least the message would give you 'dismiss' and 'explain' options," he
said. "I choose 'dismiss'
when I understand the problem and need no further assistance. When I press
the 'explain' key, I want
the program to display where the problem is, just like the old Fortran
compiler used to." 

While he agrees today's tools can save the programmer time in many ways,
the systems analyst feels
too many of them fall down when it comes to helping diagnose errors. 

"Instead of keying all those commas and parens, we just point and click on
screen using our GUI
editor and -- voila -- the required code is generated." That's fine as long
as there's no problem, he
says. "My complaint is that the finished product becomes a black box. And
when a black box fails to
operate, we are in the dark, so to speak." 

The systems analyst says his basic point is that proper diagnostics should
be a part of every computer
program. 

"I maintain that a computer program must either process the user's input --
or produce an explanation
regarding any errors. It is not acceptable for any program to bomb out, go
into a loop or wait state,
or crash the system just because the user's input is unsuitable for
whatever reason." 

Our systems analyst is of course basing his point of view on the tools he
knows, so it's entirely
possible that your experiences have been quite different. So share your
perspective on this with us.
How do you feel about today's programming tools compared to those in the
Fortrans and Cobols?
Do you find yourself too often confronted with those inscrutable error
messages, or do the tools you
use give you the diagnostics you need? 

Ed Foster 

No responses. Use respondto add one.
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