On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 11:26 AM, Jon Harrop <j...@ffconsultancy.com> wrote: > IME, the trouble can be well worth it. I once wasted two weeks trying to track > down bugs in a thousand lines of code using unit tests and never managed it. > When I finally caved in and tried to leverage the static type system instead, > I fixed all of the known bugs in 24 hours. I simply rearranged my data > structures, exactly as I did in the above example, and the OCaml compiler > would point at lines of code responsible for run-time errors and would tell > me that they had now been proven redundant and could be removed safely. That > was an enlightening 24 hours.
"Unit tests" - you keep using that phrase. I do not think it means what you think it means. :) Unit tests aren't something I'd use for tracking down bugs - and I wouldn't use them to "test" the type of all parameters to a function. I use unit tests to test all the expected paths that my program will take, which also means validating that I'll never get an unexpected type. For example, if I have a function "foo" I'll have tests that cover expected calls to "foo" with parameters that are valid. I'll also have tests around any other functions that call "foo", usually stubbing or mocking the actual call to "foo", ensuring that those calls also match the contract of "foo". And generally I'll have some kind of coverage tool to check that all non-trivial lines of code are covered by such tests, as well as some integration tests to check that everything is wired together correctly. But maybe you use unit tests some other way? How do you use unit tests to track down bugs? On the static vs dynamic question - I've worked on reasonably complex projects in Java and in Ruby, and I much prefer the dynamically typed world - mostly because it makes testing like this dramatically easier to write. I do miss some of the IDE magic you get from static typing, but I'm happy to live with a bit of IDE pain if my code is shorter, clearer, and easier to test. - Korny -- Kornelis Sietsma korny at my surname dot com kornys on gmail, twitter, facebook, etc. "Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of" --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
