You are absolutely correct. GLSL shaders were excruciatingly difficult to test and debug, before tooling caught up. As a result, I took great care to write smal

You are absolutely correct. GLSL shaders were excruciatingly difficult to test and debug, before tooling caught up. As a result, I took great care to write small and easily understood functions. It did much to improve my work in Python and C++, where debugging and unit testing were available. It's irritating to devise guidelines for good development, in general, and then have people build a cult around them. People honestly believe that unit testing is the only incentive for writing good code. This is equivalent to ascribing all good things to Dear Leader and all bad things to an out group.