alt Hacker NewsI actually think this isn't even surprising from OpenBSD philosophically. They still subscribe to the Unix philosophy of old, moreso than FreeBSD and much much more than Linux.
That is, "worse is better" and it's okay to accept a somewhat leaky abstraction or less helpful diagnostics if it simplifies the implementation.
This is why `ed` doesn't bother to say anything but "?" to erroneous commands. If the user messes up, why should it be the job of the OS to handhold them? Garbage in, garbage out. That attitude may seem out of place today but consider that it came from a time when a program might have one author and 1-20 users, so their time was valued almost equally.
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> That attitude may seem out of place today
It absolutely doesn't. Everywhere I've worked we were instructed to give terse error messages to the user. Perhaps not a single "?", but "Oops, something went wrong!" is pretty widespread and equally unhelpful.
> That attitude may seem out of place today
That attitude was out of place at every point. Now it was excusable when RAM and disk space was sparse, it isn't today, it have entirely drawbacks
Even in that scenario that attitude seems out of place, considering a feature is implemented once and used many times.
Code size would balloon if you try to format verbose error messages. I often look at the binaries of old EPROMs. I notice that 1) the amount of ASCII text is a big fraction of the binary 2) still just categories (“Illegal operation”). For the 1970s, we’re talking user programs that fit in 2K.
I write really verbose diagnostic messages in my modern code.