4 ms·

TDD on crack

23 points by fogus 17y ago

rapind 17y ago
I enjoyed your article. Gets me thinking about how to setup a dev environment where you constantly and visually see progress towards goals you've set. TDD is kind of like that already. As you knock out functionality for the tests you can feel your progress and get that sense of achievement.
joshwa 17y ago
He's just described ZenTest::Autotest. http://zentest.rubyforge.org/ZenTest/Autotest.html http://zentest.rubyforge.org/ZenTest/Autotest.html I've actually been spending the last week getting this working with my java/junit/ant workflow, so it's at least somewhat portable to other languages/environments.
martythemaniak 17y ago
Vapourware? That's ok, lack of existence has never bothered the Perl community.
- jrockway 17y ago
  Rakudo and Perl are separate projects. So I am not sure what you mean.
  - chromatic 17y ago
    He probably means that he heard somewhere several years ago (before 2005, for example) that there were no implementations of Perl 6 and hasn't bothered looking in the five years since then. It's okay. It's a common disorder.
    - mbrubeck 17y ago
      When the front page of www.perl.org says "Latest Version: 5.10.1," you can't just blame other people for being confused about whether Perl 6 is released or usable. Look at http://perl.org/ http://perl.org/ and then compare it to http://python.org/ http://python.org/ or http://ruby-lang.org/ http://ruby-lang.org/ (two other languages that are going through big backward-incompatible platform transitions). Consider how someone who isn't following the development process is supposed to find out about and download Perl 6 (versus Python 3 or Ruby 1.9).
      - jrockway 17y ago
        Perl 6 is not the next major version of Perl 5, which is what "Perl" refers to. The next major version of Perl 5 is Perl 5.12. Perl 6 is a totally different programming languages that is like Perl 5 in many ways.
        mbrubeck 17y ago
        And yet if I go to http://dev.perl.org/perl6/ http://dev.perl.org/perl6/ I read that "Perl 6 is the next version of the Perl programming language." Read the FAQ on that page and follow the links, and try to see them from an outsider's point of view. You and I know about the relation between Perl 5 and Perl 6 and the rough status of projects like Rakudo. But for someone who hasn't been following the development, it's extremely confusing and its not their fault, its the Perl 6 community's fault.
derefr 17y ago
This would be even more interesting if it pulled some of the "shiny lights" reward mechanisms that MMOs (and casinos) have going for them. I'd love to be able to hit a "you did 10 write-test-fail-write-code-pass cycles in a row" achievement, or something similar. It would only be truly addictive if the points you earned had some sort of in-game use, though--perhaps you could spend them to raise your questions on StackOverflow, or "buy" coding tools for free fom participating companies? Or perhaps companies could use them as a metric, and give programmers salaries proportional to their code-karma? ;)

23 points by fogus 17y ago

I enjoyed your article. Gets me thinking about how to setup a dev environment where you constantly and visually see progress towards goals you've set. TDD is kind of like that already. As you knock out functionality for the tests you can feel your progress and get that sense of achievement.

joshwa 17y ago

He's just described ZenTest::Autotest. http://zentest.rubyforge.org/ZenTest/Autotest.html http://zentest.rubyforge.org/ZenTest/Autotest.html I've actually been spending the last week getting this working with my java/junit/ant workflow, so it's at least somewhat portable to other languages/environments.

martythemaniak 17y ago

Vapourware? That's ok, lack of existence has never bothered the Perl community.

jrockway 17y ago
Rakudo and Perl are separate projects. So I am not sure what you mean.
- chromatic 17y ago
  He probably means that he heard somewhere several years ago (before 2005, for example) that there were no implementations of Perl 6 and hasn't bothered looking in the five years since then. It's okay. It's a common disorder.
  - mbrubeck 17y ago
    When the front page of www.perl.org says "Latest Version: 5.10.1," you can't just blame other people for being confused about whether Perl 6 is released or usable. Look at http://perl.org/ http://perl.org/ and then compare it to http://python.org/ http://python.org/ or http://ruby-lang.org/ http://ruby-lang.org/ (two other languages that are going through big backward-incompatible platform transitions). Consider how someone who isn't following the development process is supposed to find out about and download Perl 6 (versus Python 3 or Ruby 1.9).
    - jrockway 17y ago
      Perl 6 is not the next major version of Perl 5, which is what "Perl" refers to. The next major version of Perl 5 is Perl 5.12. Perl 6 is a totally different programming languages that is like Perl 5 in many ways.
      - mbrubeck 17y ago
        And yet if I go to http://dev.perl.org/perl6/ http://dev.perl.org/perl6/ I read that "Perl 6 is the next version of the Perl programming language." Read the FAQ on that page and follow the links, and try to see them from an outsider's point of view. You and I know about the relation between Perl 5 and Perl 6 and the rough status of projects like Rakudo. But for someone who hasn't been following the development, it's extremely confusing and its not their fault, its the Perl 6 community's fault.

derefr 17y ago

This would be even more interesting if it pulled some of the "shiny lights" reward mechanisms that MMOs (and casinos) have going for them. I'd love to be able to hit a "you did 10 write-test-fail-write-code-pass cycles in a row" achievement, or something similar. It would only be truly addictive if the points you earned had some sort of in-game use, though--perhaps you could spend them to raise your questions on StackOverflow, or "buy" coding tools for free fom participating companies? Or perhaps companies could use them as a metric, and give programmers salaries proportional to their code-karma? ;)