[bxrxaxdx]

OMG I have been burned by this so many times. Expect itself is a cool piece of technology and works as well as anyone could hope. However, every time I've tried to use it for anything the solution ends up being super flaky. I think trying to automate text interfaces like this is just fundamentally unreliable.

[chriswarbo]

I think of it in the same way as screen scraping Web pages, or writing buffer-heavy Emacs Lisp:

- If there are alternatives, they'll usually be better

- It'll still be around when there are no alternatives

- Some tasks (e.g. "toggle foo mode") are inherently easier than others (e.g. "press up five times and hope that's enough")

- Some tasks need frequent maintenance and tweaking (e.g. as i/o formats change, program features are added/rearranged, shell environments are tweaked, etc.)

- Some tasks work so well that they're taken for granted for a decade, and it's only when you want to tweak some part that you remember how truly horrifying the implementation is ;)