Can we talk about how everyone skips reading error messages?

I've been helping out in a small Python study group in Portland for like 6 months now, and I swear every other person just glances at the error and goes straight to Google. The error message literally tells you the line number and what's wrong 9 times out of 10. If people spent 30 seconds actually reading the red text, they'd solve half their own problems. Has anyone else noticed this with beginners, or is it just the folks I'm working with?

2 comments

2 Comments

robert_craig2d ago

Yep, this is 100% a thing. "Every other person just glances at the error and goes straight to Google." Its wild because the error message literally points to the exact line. I had someone in our group get a SyntaxError on line 12 and they asked me what was wrong. It was a missing colon after a def statement. Took me two seconds to read the message. If people just stopped and actually looked at the red text first, they'd save so much time.

hill.barbara2d ago

Man idk, maybe it's just me but @robert_craig I think part of it is people get trained to not trust error messages because sometimes they're vague or way off. Like when you get a generic "something went wrong" versus something that actually points you to the problem. So people just default to googling instead of learning which messages are actually useful.