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On Jun 12, 9:41 am, Stephen Eley <sfe...@gmail.com> wrote: > Ben and Rick, > > Thanks very much to both of you for the encouraging responses. Your > reply, Ben, came just in time as I was starting to wonder if I had > made a complete and irrevocable ass of myself. > > On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 10:36 AM, Ben Mabey<b...@benmabey.com> wrote: > > In general though I don't know if I > > really see all of this as a problem specific to RSpec. The problem is that > > many people coming to RSpec are not just RSpec novices but are in fact TDD > > novices (and Rails, and Ruby novices too boot at times as well!). > > FWIW, I agree totally. In fact I re-read my message last night, and I > want to retract one of my statements for sure: the statement that > RSpec makes "some easy things easy, but other easy things very > complicated." > > On deeper thought, I don't believe this is true. RSpec doesn't make > anything harder than it already is. There's nothing _wrong_ with > RSpec in this sense. I think a more incisive statement would be that > with RSpec, some complicated things _feel like they should be easier._ > If only because other things feel so easy. And newbies tend to > confront those problem areas at a point in the growth curve where the > complexity can be misinterpreted as them Just Not Getting It. Some > are driven off as a result. > > You're right about practice. You're right that bringing together too > many learning curves at once creates interference patterns that > shouldn't be blamed on RSpec. And Rick's reference to Martin Fowler's > spiked learning curve -- "this is scary, this is nifty, WHOOPS I > overdid it, this is okay in its place" -- is an excellent point. > > But I don't think it's totally out-of-bounds to frame it as an "RSpec > problem," even if it isn't RSpec's fault. The thing is... Well... > There are *opportunities* here. If RSpec -- along with its tools and > resources and culture -- was a little better at some of this stuff, > how much easier would it be to learn *everything else?* > > How many of us learned BDD at the same time we learned programming? > ...Show of hands? Anyone? The only developers who could make that > claim would have to be pretty fresh out of the pond. If that does > apply to anyone reading this, please speak up -- I'd like to hear your > thoughts on how you're doing. > > How many of us used TDD or BDD out of the gate when we learned Rails > or Ruby? This is plausible, but I get the sense it's uncommon. Most > of us don't even think to work on good testing practices until we > believe we're getting the rest of the stuff down. I know I didn't. > > Formal education in programming doesn't help. Not by any evidence to > my eyes. I've recently started seeing someone who's majoring in CS at > a well-known university, and he said the first class he took on > software design was in C. Frickin' *C*. _Then_ they did C++, and > then Java, but there was nothing significant about testing. I told > him about Cucumber and it made his heart go pitter-patter. > > The teaching resources for Rails and Ruby don't help. Just about > every book makes a *nod* toward testing -- there's always a chapter, > they always say "do this constantly" -- but the chapter's inevitably > somewhere near the back, after everything else has been introduced. > Rails culture is passionate about testing, but most of us don't start > to tap into that culture until we're at 'Competent' or above. > > What if the world were different? What if teaching were different? > What if the predominant lessons people used to get started with Rails > *did not* start with "Type 'rails', make a scaffold, watch it fly!" > but instead started with, "What's the most important single piece of > information in your app? Okay, great. Write a spec like this. Now > open up this file in /app/models.. [...] Your spec passed, you're > cooking! Now let's spec a view so we can see that information... Now > let's spec a controller to bring them together..." > > (Even better would be to start with Cucumber, which would take up very > little extra overhead in that type of tutorial.) > > You get the gist. What if learning Rails was *all about* learning > BDD? Would it make the Rails stuff easier to understand and develop > competence faster? I hypothesize that it would. > > Some things need to be easier in BDD before we can get there. To me > that means things need to be easier in RSpec. I believe my tutorial > above would be easy enough to do today on the model side, but it's > just too cumbersome to write a view or controller spec. You lose that > "holy crap look how *fast* this is coming!" vibe which is so > invigorating when you're doing something new. We could make that > tutorial happen when writing a controller spec takes about as long as > writing the controller *code.* There are some mitigators for this -- > the Shoulda macros may be great for this now that they work with RSpec > -- but even so I think it's probably a little bit of wading into the > swamp. > > I would like to see that world. I'd like to help *make* it. That > college guy I'm dating has asked me about learning Rails -- but I'm > planning to talk his ass off about Cucumber and RSpec before I agree > to help him with code. I'm hoping he'll be my experiment to test my > hypothesis, and I'll get a better sense of just how easy or hard it is > to learn agile Web development if BDD happens at the ground floor. > > Given time, I think the patterns facilitated by RSpec could > *completely* revolutionize the way software happens everywhere, *if* > the next generation of developers come to learn it first and not as an > "add-on." And that's why I'm picking on RSpec. I can't think of any > other technology in a better position to make this happen, with only > some moderate shifts of emphasis in both the tools and the culture. > > Does anyone else think that'd be pretty cool? > > -- > Have Fun, > Steve Eley (sfe...@gmail.com) > ESCAPE POD - The Science Fiction Podcast Magazine > http://www.escapepod.org > _______________________________________________ > rspec-users mailing list > rspec-us...@rubyforge.orghttp://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rspec-users _______________________________________________ rspec-users mailing list rspec-users@rubyforge.org http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rspec-users
