“A majority of the time, error messages should start with a verb and in most cases that verb should be prefixed with ‘cannot’...https://canonical.github.io/rust-best-practices/error-and-panic-discipline.html.”

A Cloud Path’s Root is a text written from error messages that I’ve collected in free software installed on my computer. Something tries to express its repeated failures to realise sequences of actions of which we hardly understand the nature, because they are saturated of typical digital metaphors, such as window, path, cloud....About informatical metaphors, see e.g.: Madsen, Kim Halskov, “A guide to metaphorical design,” Communications of the ACM, vol.37, no.12, 1994. The title of the work comes from an error message particularly dense, because it combines three metaphors: the cloud (remote storage), the path (location of a resource), the root (the base part of an URL).

This book is published at les éditions francis le pinguin (2026/06).