On Monday, August 13, 2001, at 08:19 AM, 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.

To be fair, there are different kinds of crashes.  Are you counting 
error messages appearing in Squeak debugger windows as crashes?  These 
are sometimes easily recoverable.  Less often, there may be apparent 
freeze-ups, which are really infinite loops within Squeak which can be 
recovered from by pressing cmd (alt)-period.

Then there are VM crashes, which are more serious, but pretty rare in my 
experience.  These are often caused by trying to allocate too much 
memory for something, like graphic memory.  (It seems like some of these 
ought to be catchable within Squeak before they crash the VM.)

> 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 ...

Not a bad idea.

> Software usage is a Darwinian process: Crashes are unpleasant, so people
> tend to unconsciously work around fatal bugs, or stop using the 
> software.
> And then, because the experience was unpleasant, they forget about the
> problems they had. The day the software is *really* released, and people
> who did not WANT to use it HAVE to use it, managers suddenly see 40% of
> the new users reporting crashes and wonder why ...

Yeah, yeah, we know.  Please submit your bug reports if you're really 
interested in helping Squeak avoid this scenario. ;-)

> Oh, and by the way, I have used Squeak about 10 times, working through
> tutorials while reading the Magenta book, and had 4 crashes in that 
> number
> of sessions. What I dislike most is the crash while saving the state on
> exit, where I lose my mods (twice) . I now save my work into a file by 
> cut
> and paste. The way it turns the Powerbook in my lap into a heater (neat
> for winter). About what I expected as a new user - if I keep using it I 
> am
> sure it will "mysteriously" be totally stable later.
>
>  This is not a rant or a complaint - most good software has gone 
> throught
> this phase, just think of linux - totally stable in the hands of a pro,
> and able to make any newbie cry in frustration during his attempts at
> installing system, particularly X windows.

Also, one thing to keep in mind is that Squeak contains a *huge* amount 
of functionality, probably a lot more than most development 
environments.  This may affect your likelihood of running into a 
problem, since there's a lot of stuff to play with, some of which is in 
relatively underused corners of Squeak.  (Squeak also contains a fair 
number of what would be considered "applications" in other environments.)

It'd be interesting (though probably nearly impossible) to try to 
measure the functionality of Squeak in, say, Function Points, and 
compare that to other development environments (MS Visual Studio, Java 
w/Forte, etc.).  I think Squeak probably has a lot more *stuff* in it, 
especially relative to its disk space usage.

- Doug Way
   dway at riskmetrics.com


> Edmund
>
> Squeak is what a mouse does when you rub its ball the wrong way :)
>
>
>