Compiler Error Messages Considered Unhelpful: The Landscape of Text-Based Programming Error Message Research

Diagnostic messages generated by compilers and interpreters such as syntax error messages have been researched for over half of a century. Unfortunately, these messages which include error, warning, and run-time messages, present substantial difficulty and could be more effective, particularly for novices. Recent years have seen an increased number of papers in the area including studies on the effectiveness of these messages, improving or enhancing them, and their usefulness as a part of programming process data that can be used to predict student performance, track student progress, and tailor learning plans. Despite this increased interest, the long history of literature is quite scattered and has not been brought together in any digestible form.

In order to help the computing education community (and related communities) to further advance work on programming error messages, we present a comprehensive, historical and state-of-the-art report on research in the area. In addition, we synthesise and present the existing evidence for these messages including the difficulties they present and their effectiveness. We finally present a set of guidelines, curated from the literature, classified on the type of evidence supporting each one (historical, anecdotal, and empirical). This work can serve as a starting point for those who wish to conduct research on compiler error messages, runtime errors, and warnings. We also make the bibtex file of our 300+ reference corpus publicly available. Collectively this report and the bibliography will be useful to those who wish to design better messages or those that aim to measure their effectiveness, more effectively.