Is Transcript's English orientation a plus or minus?

[Robert Brenstein]

>On Tuesday, February 10, 2004, at 07:05 PM, Scott Rossi wrote:
>
>>While I can't say I've pushed the engine as hard as the combined talent of
>>this list, in my experience the engine's performance has been exceptional.
>
>I find this interesting.  And frustrating.
>
>When the general assumption among the community is that the engine 
>is perfect, then bug reports are considered spurious.
>
>When I first started using Revolution two years ago, I assumed bugs 
>would be fixed quickly.  This was a stupid and costly error on my 
>part.  The roadblock I hit was the logic that Metacard is perfect, 
>therefore the bug reports are wrong.  One crucial bug took over 7 
>months to fix.  There were a handful of sockets bugs and yet folks 
>were blindly using Revolution for all kinds of Internet apps. (The 
>open process bugs are a mess and I don't even bother to report those 
>any more.)  Did folks see my bugs and wonder whether that would 
>affect their internet apps?  I didn't see it.  I suggested to one 
>person his problems might be related to mine and his went away after 
>mine were fixed and he shrugged it off.  Another complained that 
>libURL was flakey.  Well, duh!
>
>The best way to make the engine rock-solid is to knock over the idol.
>
>Dar Scott

Nobody said perfect. Rock-solid does not mean bug-free. No program 
that has some complexity ever is. But MetaCard crashed barely ever (I 
found a couple ways to crash it but I was pushing it), most features 
worked as expected, and bugs were addressed in a reasonable time. I 
don't think we are trying to idealize/idolize MC. It was not perfect. 
But we want Rev to reach its level and better.

One significantly different thing about Rev is that not all 
features/functionality are implemented in the engine. And Rev team 
added a whole bunch of new stuff on top or next to the old stuff 
(when the two were developed in parallel). And Rev's IDE is so much 
more complex and introduces a number of kinks and funky behaviors 
that go away when it is turned off.

Robert