There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about the “Toddler stage” of software in general and Simics 4.6 in particular. To me, software in an early stage of development shares many traits with a toddler:
The software will sometimes behave as expected, but more often than not it will not. It will do something else, or crash, or generally do the wrong thing. It is very much like a toddler – you can rely on it to some extent, but you never know when it will decide to do something unexpected, funny, or just throw a fit over something that would have seemed inconsequential.