This is very fair criticism. Julia has yet to make the full transition from research project to production language. Having seen Julia evolve over the past 2+ years, I feel like stability and test coverage have improved a lot and I expect them to improve further.

I fully agree on the need for more testing. We've been trying to make sure that new functionality and all issues reported come with tests where possible and I actually think we've been making progress on that front (and especially compared to two years ago), but we need to do a lot more of this. For a significant number of the core contributors (myself included), Julia is probably the first big project we're working on and we're still learning proper release engineering and making software for a large number of users.

That said, I think we've been pretty good about keeping master functional recently and I don't remember the last time I pulled from master and had something break (I think the travis status analysis is misleading here, because it probably includes development branches as well as instances where the CI system itself is failing - either because travis is down, or because the servers for dependencies are down etc). I also don't think that we've ever left master broken for days at a time when there was an easy fix available (of course bugs that come up and you don't know how to fix can always happen).

On that topic though, I think we have room for improvement. I've been thinking about moving to a pre-commit CI system (you push to a branch and the CI system merges once everything's green), especially now that we have CI coverage for all 3 supported platforms. I'll bring that up on the mailing list.

So much for the Julia core. Packages are a different issue and I agree that we have a problem with package quality. That are a few very high quality packages (I'm thinking e.g. Color and Distributions) and a long tail of packages of varying quality. Iain has been doing great work on this front with http://pkg.julialang.org/pulse.html and making sure that packages keep up with changes in julia and at least pass their own test suite, but there's obviously a lot of work to be done there.

The good thing is though that since these packages are completely decoupled from Julia core, this can be easily parallelized. One of the advantages of Julia is that the core is pretty small (admittedly bigger now than it should be and we need to split some stuff out) and it's in general pretty easy to look at the code which hopefully makes it easy hack on packages. Making high quality packages requires a lot of time and work and since Julia is such a young language, the ecosystem is still immature.

If you have thoughts on what we can do to improve package quality or make things easier on package developers, please let us know, we'd love to hear them.

Finally, I also would like to ask to please, please file bug reports for things that don't work the way you expect them to or for any bugs you encounter. One of the things mentioned in the OP was the REPL rewrite (which I worked on). The original REPL was a messy readline based hack, which really needed to be replaced. Admittedly, readline has a lot of features and I originally only implemented the ones that were part of my workflow, but I fully expected people to file issues for any features they were missing (and they did) and I and others quickly implemented lots of features (including quite a number not present in the original rewrite). Of the REPL issues currently open, I can see only one that may have worked with the original REPL (emacs keybindings). In any case, if you're missing features in the REPL please file an issue.

I'll end with my general disclaimer that while Julia has a lot to offer, it is not yet a polished system and I don't yet recommend using it if that's the experience you want.

Sorry for making this so long

TL;DR I agree, Base needs more testing, but I think we've been making progress on that. Another big issue is package quality, which I'm not sure how to fix. If you encounter bugs please file issues.