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I think I get what you're saying! It's fine to write code that allows for and enables bad practices when it suits a pragmatic need. We therefore totally agree
by tomlockwood 4y ago
I think I get what you're saying! It's fine to write code that allows for and enables bad practices when it suits a pragmatic need. We therefore totally agree.
- Dylan16807 4y agoYeah! But it also helps to discourage those bad practices in the future. So when the minitest authors added this feature, they enabled the bad practices for a pragmatic need, and also did something to discourage it. On the other hand, when the people wrote those tests, they weren't writing them that way to suit a pragmatic need. They were just making a mistake. That's why the former doesn't suck, but the latter does suck. And the writers of those tests are not just enabling bad practices, they are directly performing the bad practices.
- tomlockwood 4y agoI see, so if bad practices also discourage their future usage, things are fine. So if someone writes a bad test and it makes code refactoring harder, things are fine! Perfect!
- Dylan16807 4y ago> So if someone writes a bad test and it makes code refactoring harder, things are fine! I said it's good to discourage bad practices. Unless you think refactoring is a bad practice, you have understood my comment incorrectly. But also you can remove the part about discouraging from the previous post, if it's confusing: Minitest enabled bad practices for a pragmatic reason. The tests were not following bad practices for a pragmatic reason, they did it by mistake. Enabling is less bad than doing, and minitest had a reason while the bad tests didn't. Therefore minitest doesn't suck and those tests do suck. Edit: fixed a couple typos
- tomlockwood 4y agoI think we should probably go back to what I said at the very start: "I've noticed a lot of developers that have this kind of code purity complex where their way of doing things is superior even if the actual code Works - which I think is the number one most important thing about code."
- Dylan16807 4y agoSo that's calling them wrong about whether the tests are bad. Okay, fine, you can have that opinion. But there's no way to twist that around into "minitest devs are the ones that suck by their own logic". Either nobody here sucks at coding, or some test-writers suck at coding. But those are the only two options that make sense.
- tomlockwood 4y ago> So that's calling them wrong about whether the tests are bad. Okay, fine, you can have that opinion. What you're saying, is also just an opinion.
- Dylan16807 4y agoWhen I say that you can't turn their own standard against them, that is not an opinion. (Except in the "everything is an opinion" sense.) I'm asserting a fact about how words interact.
- tomlockwood 4y agoI'm sorry, if you don't think there are opinions about how words interact we really need to go back to fundamental philosophical basics here.
- Dylan16807 4y agoI do think there can be opinions, but if you stretch that enough then at a certain point you hit "everything is an opinion" territory and then it no longer matters if you call something an "opinion". When I say your disagreement with them is an "opinion", I am not using that definition. I'm using a much more narrow definition. You have different ideas of what makes code good. Different preferences. While my argument is not based on my preferences. When I called those tests bad I was just explaining the point. It doesn't actually matter if I think the tests are bad or not. Either way the minitest devs are absolved of their own criticism. If you would like me to use a different word than "opinion", you can suggest one. The point is, please understand what I mean, and let's not argue about how to define words.