Obscurity Is The Key - Sun, 23 May 2010

Behold is again getting to the point where most of the bugs in it are fairly obscure. The average person using Behold with their average GEDCOM file should find mostly everything working right. If they look closely, there might be what I’d call “obscure” bugs - special cases of GEDCOM being handled a bit oddly by by Behold.

Of course I am working to fix those, but I also realize that a 100% perfect program is impossible. Microsoft itself doesn’t strive for perfect, but only tries to be “good enough”. That model is not a bad one. Yes, it does frustrate a lot of people who enjoy the hobby of complaining all the time about the glitches they run into. That can’t be helped. The bigger and more complex the software is, the more glitches it will have.

But at this point I am getting happy again the way I was at the end of the alpha phase. More and more of the bugs reported and that I’m finding are turning out to be fairly obscure. This means that it is unlikely that two people with different GEDCOMs will run into the same bug. This is unlike the bad bug I added in the previous to the last beta which broke the source references for everyone.

I’ve got a few more user-reported problems to fix and I’ll issue another beta release. Then I’ll work to get the error checking and log file to be rock solid, followed by a rigorous checking of all my test datasets and corrections of any obscure bugs that show up from them. Then its the help file and version 1.0. If I can do that, that will be “good enough”.