I received the following email today (I have paraphrased and anonymised it to protect the innocent):
“We were given a Macro Scheduler script to run on our system that someone else wrote which we are trying to use with your trial version. It doesn’t work. Your product seems to be very flaky and unreliable. Is this a feature of the trial version?”.
Now, when I read an email like that I have to breathe carefully and compose myself. To see what’s wrong with it let’s reword the same message as if it were talking about a different product:
“We were given a VBScript file which someone else wrote and we are trying to run it on our system but having problems. Microsoft VBScript must be very buggy!”
Yeh, so because a script that someone else built using a particular product is buggy the user thinks it is the product that is buggy. It seems not to have occurred to them that the script they were given is clearly not put together very well, or at least not written to run on their system. It hasn’t crossed their mind to report back to the person who wrote the script. For all we know the person who wrote it never intended it to be run on any other system but his/hers anyway.
You can build all kinds of dodgy, bug-ridden and dangerous software with C++. Does that mean Microsoft Visual Studio has a bug?
I’ve downloaded lots of dodgy VBscript code snippets, buggy PHP files and Perl scripts that fail to do what the author says they do, or need tweaking to work on my system. It never occurred to me to blame the VBScript, PHP or Perl interpreters. Next time rather than email the author of the code I’ll email Microsoft, PHP.com or Larry Wall instead.
Sheesh.
