Hi Evzen,

I remember going through a similar period of "chaos" when Studio 2014 came out.

Big programs have to be coded so that the pieces work relatively independently. You don't want a change in a database routine messing up a screen display routine or a wordcount routine. I used to code, and I remember coming across massive programs that had been patched and re-patched so long that no one really knew what side effects a change might have.

When I think of Studio I think of a big map with places that have heavy traffic and places that hardly anyone travels through. The heavy traffic areas are options settings and features that a lot of people use. Because everyone uses them, they have been debugged extensively.

But if you use a combination of settings and features that no one has used before, you are in the middle of no-where land, where no debugger has ever been before. Or if you update to a new version and there are some strange settings left over from the previous version, you could end up somewhere that no debugger has been.

I used to be adventurous, using Studio settings and features that looked like they could be useful. But I had to repair Studio, and reinstall Studio over and over. And I had to live with bugs that kept bothering me for years, from one update to another, regardless of what I did -- until I moved to a brand new computer.

I finally decided to use the default settings wherever I could, avoid doing anything that might take me into no-where land, and avoid using new features until other brave travelers had ventured into the new uncharted areas and discovered all the new bugs.

After all, some users are finding bugs that make Studio completely unusable for days or weeks at a time until some genius at SDL figures out how to fix it. I certainly don't want to be one of those users.

A similar thing happened when I started using Dragon Naturally Speaking, another massive program that has probably been patched and re-patched over decades. At first I kept crashing the program and getting all kinds of strange errors, using the Dragon cleaner to remove every trace of the program and reinstalling it -- probably because I tried too many things, expecting them to work because the documentation said they would.

Let's face it, Dragon and Studio would be market failures if they kept crashing on every user. So if you use them "out-of-the-box", with defaults for almost everything, then they must be pretty reliable. As a result, I have just reduced my expectations :-)

Best regards,
Bruce Campbell
ASAP Language Services