This is the typical lazy answer, but there's a problem here: We haven't been talking about the article itself since half of the thread though, so I don't know what you're referring to.

To get back to the topic, there are no reason why there couldn't be a good error message (there's no “two options” when you write your error messages) and if the error message is good enough so you don't have to Google it, you can and should localize it so the majority of the people of this planet could in fact read it. And you also want to put a error code available in case you still wanted to investigate about it, but there's little reason for this error code to be 32bits long unless you have 4 billion different possible errors in your app…