4 ms·

I can’t concur with this enough. I’ve been on projects where mocking _literally made the project less reliable_ because people ended up “testing” against mocks

by asa400 10mo ago

I can’t concur with this enough. I’ve been on projects where mocking _literally made the project less reliable_ because people ended up “testing” against mocks that didn’t accurately reflect the behavior of the real APIs. It left us with functionality that wasn’t actually tested and resulted in real bugs and regressions that shipped. Mocking is one of these weird programmer pop-culture memetic viruses that spread in the early 2000s and achieved complete victory in the 2010s, like Agile and OOP, and now there are entire generations of devs who it’s not that they’re making a bad or a poorly argued choice, it’s that they literally don’t even know there are other ways of thinking about these problems because these ideas have sucked all the oxygen out of the room.

rgoulter 10mo ago
> like Agile and OOP Ha. I think there's room to argue "Agile" is a popular bastardisation of what's meant by "agile software development", and with "OOP" we got the lame Java interpretation rather than the sophisticated Smalltalk interpretation. -- Or I might think that these ideas aren't that good if their poor imitations win out over the "proper" ideas. With mocking.. I'm willing to be curious that there's some good/effective way of doing it. But the idea of "you're just testing that the compiler works" comes to mind.
- lisbbb 10mo ago
  Had my fill of both until I could not stand it anymore. So tired of the grifters--agile was sometimes good, but mostly a grift.
- ben_w 10mo ago
  For OOP, I'd say the issue isn't so much that it's not useful (it is very useful), but rather that it was treated as "common sense, the only way to do it". Sometimes the right tool for the job is objects, sometimes it's functional, sometimes you do want encapsulation but it's better as structs and using composition over inheritance. When everything looks like a `class Hammer extends Tool`…
  - asa400 10mo ago
    Agreed - I like your phrasing of it. There are some good ideas in OOP. I don't know that I'd go as far as to credit OOP for those ideas, but things like polymorphism and encapsulation can be very useful. What I objected to was, as you said, OOP became "the only way to do it". It became a dogma. I was very happy when functional programming started to break through and show that there were other ways that were not only viable, but often better.

by asa400 10mo ago

rgoulter 10mo ago

> like Agile and OOP Ha. I think there's room to argue "Agile" is a popular bastardisation of what's meant by "agile software development", and with "OOP" we got the lame Java interpretation rather than the sophisticated Smalltalk interpretation. -- Or I might think that these ideas aren't that good if their poor imitations win out over the "proper" ideas. With mocking.. I'm willing to be curious that there's some good/effective way of doing it. But the idea of "you're just testing that the compiler works" comes to mind.

lisbbb 10mo ago
Had my fill of both until I could not stand it anymore. So tired of the grifters--agile was sometimes good, but mostly a grift.
ben_w 10mo ago
For OOP, I'd say the issue isn't so much that it's not useful (it is very useful), but rather that it was treated as "common sense, the only way to do it". Sometimes the right tool for the job is objects, sometimes it's functional, sometimes you do want encapsulation but it's better as structs and using composition over inheritance. When everything looks like a `class Hammer extends Tool`…
- asa400 10mo ago
  Agreed - I like your phrasing of it. There are some good ideas in OOP. I don't know that I'd go as far as to credit OOP for those ideas, but things like polymorphism and encapsulation can be very useful. What I objected to was, as you said, OOP became "the only way to do it". It became a dogma. I was very happy when functional programming started to break through and show that there were other ways that were not only viable, but often better.