On Mon, Aug 13, 2001 at 02:19:15PM +0200, Edmund Ronald wrote:
> I used to do evaluations of pprogramming language products professionally,
> as a journalist. My experience with Squeak rates it a 3.5/5 in stability.
> 
> It will crash with good probability in a new-use situation, and be
> extremely stable in an established use pattern. This is a standard state
> of narrowly software, whose developers fix the bugs _they_ see
> immediately, but do not really get much external input on stability.
 
This is good advice, and very good insight into the "blind spots" that
we all develop. I think it's a little like not being able to catch
your own spelling errors. I manage to crash my image once in a while,
usually by doing something dumb that seemed reasonable at the time.
But I have figured out ways to work around it (recovering things from
the changes file and so forth), so things seem very stable to me
now. For a new user, an image crash is not a reassuring thing.

> There is a cheap way around this trap: Add to the README a notice saying :
> If you have any difficulty in installing this software, if it crashes
> during the first uses, or if your initial expectations are not met, please
> note the details of what you did and email the following adress ...

More good advice.

Dave