As a newbie, one of the hardest parts of Julia for me yet, is clearly its error messages.
I find them often to be more confusing than helpful, and I am aware, that a part of this comes from the nature of Julia’s type system.
Also, I think a substantial amount of disorder comes from the lack of conscious formatting, contextual information, and user guidance.
I envision the error reporting to be more akin to Elm, Rust.
And I am more than willing to contribute such conscious compiler communication.
See what John Carmack has to say about this, a known legend in the industry.
Such improved error messaging has shown to be quite popular at the communities, it is introduced.
Some of the improvements with JuliaSyntax have landed in 1.10 (not sure if you’re using it). I think the expectation is that these errors will be improved from now, with this framework.
Yes, this is why I wrote: ‘The upcoming JuliaSyntax is thankfully improving the situation significantly’
Still, it has mostly improved error detection, and NOT how errors are presented.
They have not changed, to my knowledge, how they are set into context, and have not empowered the compiler to guide the user through the steps that follow.
As an example, by providing a link to the respective documentation.
The improvements of JuliaSyntax are huge, I love them, and they barely touch the subject, of what I am talking about here.
There is a huge potential in how the errors are presented, contextualized and how they are used, to inform the user about the mistake they have done.