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0 pointscrimsonalucard7y ago0 comments

I never discounted unit tests. I advocate it as an important feature in a project. I'm saying you need significantly less when you have the types of checks I talk about in place. :)

The guy I'm criticizing here is a certain breed of person who advocates unit tests but suffers from a logical flaw in his reasoning. He advocates unit tests like a mad man but he uses an unsafe, untyped language for the entire project. Javascript is the worst offender here.

Unit tests are a safety first philosophy that is employed at the inconvenience of writing tests. However, it makes ZERO sense to employ unit tests as a safety net without type checking as a feature that proves your program is absent of type errors. Remember unit tests only verify a test case works, the safety features I talk about in my post actually Prove your program correct.

This is a huge flaw in engineering paradigms that I see permeate the industry today. People literally are ignoring a feature that proves a major part of your program correct and they are advocating the entire program be safe guarded with a weaker check (unit testing). I advocate we use both.

We see thousands of python, ruby and nodejs projects with massive unit testing overhead on top of the project itself. What these advocates don't realize is that you can get rid of 80% of these tests with a type safe language. I urge you to check the unit testing involved with a golang project vs javascript. There's usually a significant difference in size. For robust applications the unit testing suite of a javascript app is much much bigger in size.

I end with a quote from a guy who used logical methods to prove the absence of bugs in his programs rather then rely on hundreds of unit tests.

"Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs." - Dijkstra (1969).

0 comments

vonseel7y ago

I understand your viewpoint, but aren't you assuming that the "guy advocating unit tests" has the option of choosing a type-safe language? In my experience, the programmers rarely have the power to choose the programming language. In fact, they were probably hired because of their expertise in the language already being used.

Just saying, if I'm writing Python and advocating unit-tests... even of TypeError exceptions and similar problems that would be avoided by using Golang... it's probably because I know these are common problems in Python/JS/non-type-safe languages, and I probably don't have the power to choose a different language than the one already being used by my company/development organization.

crimsonalucardOP7y ago

For python you can use type annotations with an external type checker such as mypy or flow for js.

To implement type checking in js or python would add a layer of unparalleled safety for a fraction of the development time involved with unit tests.

Yet I would say 90% of developers are unaware of this contradiction and go on piping about the extreme importance of unit tests while completely ignoring type checking. They value safety but are too naive to know what safety means.