Yearly Archives: 2010
Single Abstract Method Macro
John Rose’s article, Scheme in One Class, introduced me to the notion of Single Abstract Method, or SAM, classes. One of the proposed APIs for JSR-292 allows a MethodHandle (the Java version of a closure) to be cast to any … Continue reading
The Expression Problem in Clojure
My article for IBM developerWorks has been published: “Solving the Expression Problem with Clojure 1.2″
Hair Color
An antisocial experiment to answer that age-old question: who really has more fun? On Google, “blondes” get the most attention with 147 million hits. ”Brunettes” get 78.6 million and “redheads,” 12.8 million. However, of the three, only “redheads” start off … Continue reading
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Beware Choosing the Most Complex Tool for the Job
I once saw a TV show about competing groups of archeologists trying to demonstrate how the ancient Egyptians raised stone obelisks weighing hundreds of tons. One group of archeologists built a complex apparatus involving a wooden frame and lots of … Continue reading
Assertions and Invariants
I’ve been thinking a lot about testing frameworks over the past six months, and I’m not the only Stuart doing that. Stuart Halloway, who spent some time on his own Clojure testing framework, Circumspec, recently wrote about his experiences refactoring … Continue reading
Slightly Less Typed Assertions
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about typed assertions for Lazytest. Like so many things, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Define typed objects for each kind of assertion (e.g., equality, instanceof). When a test fails, … Continue reading
Lazytest Churn
One of my stated goals with Lazytest was to enforce a clean separation between test assertions and code that runs before/around the assertions. The Spock framework for Java/Groovy calls these the stimulus and response, identified by the keywords when and … Continue reading
Two Steps Forward, One Step Back
Following my last post I integrated typed assertions into the master branch of Lazytest. This makes some changes to the API. Test examples in the it macro can no longer simply return true or false. Instead, they must call the … Continue reading
Typed Assertions Tell You What Hurts
One thing clojure.test did reasonably well was tell you why an assertion failed. Currently, Lazytest fails in this regard. The problem with requiring test functions to return true/false to indicate pass/fail is that they can’t attach any additional information to … Continue reading
A Journey of a Thousand Lines Begins with a Single Test
I have a curious obsession with testing frameworks. The first thing I do with any new programming language is try to write a test framework in it. It’s a useful exercise for exploring the metaprogramming facilities provided by any language. … Continue reading