But a wholly non-funny "Invariant Violated" message would be no better. The problem isn't that the message is funny, but that it does not contain the information you need to understand what's going on. The whimsy is just a distraction.
Doesn’t matter. The important thing is that I can look them up or resolve them easily. Without looking it up can you tell me the difference between HTTP 451 and 510? If not they’re no more useful than I’m a teapot. But I can identify both of those uniquely and figure out where they’re coming from.
Do you find that distracting things help you debug shoddy code?