Digital Digressions by Stuart Sierra
From programming to everything else
I am responsible — for better or for worse — for the library which eventually became clojure.test. It has remained largely the same since it was first added to the language distribution back in the pre-1.0 days. While there are many things about clojure.test which I would do differently now — dynamic binding, var metadata,…
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 a failure to explain why it failed. I realized that function return values are insufficient…
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. So in C, I use preprocessor macros; in Java, annotations; and in a Lisp, macros.…
It’s interesting to see the first signs of rebellion against RSpec. I jumped on the RSpec bandwagon when it first appeared, mostly so I wouldn’t have to write “assert_equals” all the time. But while I liked and used RSpec, I don’t think it made my tests any better. If anything, they were a little bit…