[Ticket#: 2006040510000641] Re: [OT] Articles to read

[Bob Warren]

I didn't send this e-mail yesterday, because others had already said all 
that I really wanted to say - only better. However, I think that we 
might profit from a common sense approach to bugs. If they are 
immediately apparent, then they should never have got there in the first 
place. If not, the proper reporting of less obvious bugs is a help, but 
certainly not through a perverse system like Bugzilla. The whole problem 
as I see it is the fact that the system is geared to the acceptance of 
an excessive number of bugs, which of course demands an organisation 
that should never have arisen in the first place. If there were 
significantly fewer bugs in the IDE (as there should be), then the 
UR-List itself might even be sufficient for reporting them. What's more 
the Rev team would kiss our feet for bringing them up (by the way, I 
wash my feet at least once a month...). Under the present philosopy and 
practice, such a state of affairs is unimaginable, but that is not to 
say that it is not perfectly possible. Arguments about whether "zero 
bugs" are possible or not are silly. The Rev IDE has far too many bugs, 
that's all, and they need to be significantly reduced in order to 
provoke an urgently-needed qualitative change.

Here is yesterday's unsent mail:

Here we are, discussing IDE bugs again. Try using the Linux version of
Rev....

But rather than stir up passions or comment upon the severe cases of
denial that key contributers to this list seem to suffer from, I want to
make a simple comparison.

Microsoft are known for the instability of their OS, particularly before
Win XP, with "blue screens of death" etc. However, I used VB6
intensively from the very beginning, and in my experience:

1) Never once did I find a single bug in the IDE
2) Never once did I need to participate in forums etc. in order to find
out how to do things.

Of course, there WERE bugs in VB6, since before they abandoned it they
got up to Service Pack 6 (SP6) in order to eliminate the less obvious
problems, but such bugs were beyond my experience.

Regarding technical help, I needed to go surfing on the Internet to find
out how to do things which were non-standard in VB, but apart from that
the manuals provided with VB were more than sufficient.

Some years ago now, I made my first contact with Rev, but only recently
have I found the courage to actually try and use it. My experience with
the IDE was totally different, because of the bugs I mean, not because
of the more complex way of producing programs.

At this moment, I am trying to move to Linux with a view to abandoning
Windows altogether. However, because of the frustration with the Rev
IDE, particularly in Linux, the thought "good old Microsoft" comes into
my head, and it makes my hair stand on end! How COULD a person like me
be provoked to think such a thing!

God only knows what programming systems some of you have used in the
past, but the fact that the Rev IDE compares favourably to them in terms
of stability is beyond my VB6 comprehension.

All of this is rather tragic. As I have said before, Revolution is a
great programming system with a potentially fantastic future. I love
Transcript, I love the IDE, and yes I even love the code editor. ALL
they have to do is debug the damn thing!

That said, Rev are obviously paying more attention to the stability of
the IDE than they have done in the past. But with the sins already
committed and accumulated, putting things right won't be all that easy I
imagine.

I say, let's help make Rev a really great product, which it has the
potential to be, not by the use of politics (which is the only
explanation I can find for some of the opinions I see on this list), but
by the use of hard work which is more appropriately directed towards
debugging in preference to the introduction of new features, at least
for an appropriate period.

Bob Warren