From: James Edward Gray II <james@...>
Date: 2007-03-30T10:24:29+09:00
Subject: Re: On Enterprise Ruby

On Mar 29, 2007, at 7:35 PM, S. Robert James wrote:

> You can't respect the idea that a library which not even the
> developers feel comfortable calling "production ready", and which
> hasn't stood the test of time, may very well have a high number of
> bugs?

I'm disappointed by your gross generalization.  For example, you have  
no idea how I think or choose version numbers.

When I first released FasterCSV, I wanted to be darn sure the parser  
just worked. I didn't feel I could recommend people replace CSV with  
FasterCSV without being very confident it worked.

To give myself that confidence, I ran FasterCSV and CSV over all the  
real-world CSV data I could get my hands on, verifying they produced  
the same results, except where I wanted FasterCSV to make different  
choices.  I got some of the most clever people in Ruby to dream up  
all the edge cases they could and I tried those too.  I actually got  
a bug report to remove tests from FasterCSV at one point, because the  
exhaustive coverage just took too long to run.

The parser worked, damn good, at version 0.1.0 though.  Trust me.   
Only one bug has ever been found in FasterCSV's parser.  (There have  
been plenty in my interface and shortcuts, of course.)

However, when I designed FasterCSV, I knew I wanted to add in all the  
niceties I've always wished CSV would do for me.  So 0.1.0 was  
already superior to CSV, in my opinion, but I decided I would call it  
1.0.0 when it did everything I wanted.

People began using the library immediately and it was very popular  
long before it hit 1.0.0.  It was not what I would call buggy software.

James Edward Gray II