On Friday, 5 December 2014 at 09:27:16 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
On Friday, 5 December 2014 at 02:25:20 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 12/4/2014 5:32 PM, ketmar via Digitalmars-d wrote:
http://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/java-for-everything.html
i didn't read the article, but i bet that this is just
another article
about his language of preference and how any other language
he tried
doesn't have X or Y or Z. and those X, Y and Z are something
like "not
being on market for long enough", "vendor ACME didn't ported
ACMElib to
it", "out staff is trained in G but not in M" and so on.
boring.
From the article:
"Most importantly, the kinds of bugs that people introduce
most often aren’t the kind of bugs that unit tests catch. With
few exceptions (such as parsers), unit tests are a waste of
time."
Not my experience with unittests, repeated over decades and
with different languages. Unit tests are a huge win, even with
statically typed languages.
Yes, but they cannot test everything. GUI code is specially
ugly as it requires UI automation tooling.
They do exist, but only enterprise customers are willing to pay
for it.
This is why WPF has UI automation built-in.
The biggest problem with unit tests are managers that want to
see shiny reports, like those produced by tools like Sonar.
Teams than spend ridiculous amount of time writing superfluous
unit tests just to match milestone targets.
Just because code has tests, doesn't mean the tests are testing
what they should. But if they reach the magical percentage
number then everyone is happy.
--
Paulo
Now is the right time to confess. I hardly ever use unit tests
although it's included (and encouraged) in D. Why? When I write
new code I "unit test" as I go along, with
debug writefln("result %s", result);
and stuff like this. Stupid? Unprofessional? I don't know. It
works. I once started to write unit tests only to find out that
indeed they don't catch bugs, because you only put into unit
tests what you know (or expect) at a given moment (just like the
old writefln()). The bugs I, or other people, discover later
would usually not be caught by unit tests simply because you
write for your own expectations at a given moment and don't
realize that there are millions of other ways to go astray. So
the bugs are usually due to a lack of imagination or a tunnel
vision at the moment of writing code. This will be reflected in
the unit tests as well. So why bother? You merely enshrine your
own restricted and circular logic in "tests". Which reminds me of
maths when teachers would tell us "And see, it makes perfect
sense!", yeah, because they laid down the rules themselves in the
first place.
The same goes for comparing your output to some "gold standard".
The program claims to have an accuracy of 98%. Sure, because you
wrote for the gold standard and not for the real world where it
drastically drops to 70%.
The good thing about unit tests is that they tell you when you
break existing code. But you'll realize that soon enough anyway.
