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    As a developer I know about edge cases where we simply can't know what went wrong. We can neither be explicit here nor can we be precise and I would rather tell the user that something went wrong than to bore him with the assumption that a third-party plugin proably failed at some point. In theory your linked article sounds perfectly correct but it isn't always that easy. However not leaving the user alone and e.g. give him some feeling of control is always a good idea. Commented Aug 20, 2015 at 16:10
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    The point about never showing an ambiguous error is to encourage best practices and to say you should be specific whenever systematically possible. Because you're right, sometimes you can't get good details from the system, but that doesn't mean you can't provide the user something better than, "Error 500." Commented Aug 20, 2015 at 16:18
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    @Marvin I think your example actually counters your point- if you know it's some error in a plugin, that's exactly what you should say to the user "One of the plugins you installed/enabled has caused a problem. Please restart in Safe Mode ... etc." Commented Sep 15, 2016 at 3:07
  • Is any error "expected"? What does "unexpected" add? Commented Sep 13, 2018 at 18:51