&gt; We also will talk about logic errors at the end, which means that your program runs without crashing, but still produces the wrong result. An example would be<p><pre><code>         Please close the back door so that the bugs don&#x27;t come in.
</code></pre>
&gt; This would be a logic error if the front door is also open: even though the command makes sense and you can close the back door, this doesn&#x27;t actually accomplish the goal of keeping the bugs out since they&#x27;ll still come in the front door.<p>---------------<p>As someone who also struggles to teach beginners how to program...I&#x27;ve learned that teaching the concept of &quot;error&quot; is extremely difficult. Non-programmers have a much fuzzier concept of what a programming &quot;error&quot; is, and this is a major obstacle.<p>Right now I&#x27;m teaching SQL, which is relatively straightforward as languages go. When a student tells me they ran into an error (and more often than not, doesn&#x27;t think to include the error message), it can mean any of these things:<p>1. There&#x27;s a syntax error.<p>2. The GUI crashed, or was otherwise acting up.<p>3. No results were returned.<p>4. Nonsensical results were returned (such as when doing an inner join without supplying a constraint).<p>#3 and #4 are incredibly annoying to deal with...because they <i>aren&#x27;t</i> errors, at least on behalf of the interpreter.  If your WHERE condition is `NAME = &#x27;Dan&#x27; AND NAME = &#x27;Daniel&#x27;&quot; -- and you get exactly 0 results -- that is what is <i>supposed</i> to happen. Some might even argue that it&#x27;s not really a logical error; it&#x27;s just a tautology. The problem is with the user&#x27;s <i>expectation</i> -- they <i>think</i> they&#x27;ve written something more profound than a tautology, and there&#x27;s nothing the SQL interpreter can really do to tell them otherwise (short of installing a Clippy-like plugin that pops up and asks, &quot;Did you really mean to ask that?&quot;...which, as we all know, has its own tradeoffs...)<p>But this isn&#x27;t even the most frustrating part -- what&#x27;s frustrating is when beginners don&#x27;t even know what to expect...so for problems of type #4...when they&#x27;ve done a WHERE conditional like this: `WHERE Name != &#x27;Dan&#x27; OR Name != &#x27;Daniel&#x27;`...and get <i>all</i> of the results...they think their program &quot;worked&quot;...especially if they hadn&#x27;t noticed that the number of returned results is, coincidentally, the exact number of results in the entire unfiltered table.<p>So to go back to the OP&#x27;s explanation of an error above...it&#x27;s just <i>wrong</i>...because it&#x27;s not a logical error. And it&#x27;s not even a real-life &quot;common sense&quot; error -- closing the back door (in a normal scenario) <i>does</i> prevent bugs coming in...at least _from the back door_. The only way you could interpret this as an &quot;error&quot; is to have the expectation that a single sentence&#x2F;command&#x2F;statement should be the one-all solution to the problem...and that is an assumption that is profoundly <i>limited</i> in how it implies that there is only one solution, or that solutions don&#x27;t have tradeoffs (both in real life and in the computational setting)<p>After all, if the student amends the statement to add &quot;AND the front door&quot;...it&#x27;s still an error because what about the side doors or windows? And even then, another student could reasonably argue that the &quot;correct&quot; answer is to &quot;take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.&quot;<p>So, yeah, explaining computational concepts to people who are used to the fuzzy and beautiful way that humans communicate and miscommunicate is really, really difficult...and I believe that explaining the concept of errors is probably at the top of the difficulty pyramid.