29.3.11. Needlessly adding complexity in tests in order to hide their complexity

Some tweets from DHH on testing:

I respect the guys behind it and I'm all for experimentation, but the proliferation of rSpec and Cucumber makes me sad. (source)

RSpec offends me aesthetically with no discernible benefit for its added complexity over test/unit. (source)

Cucumber makes no sense to me unless you have clients reading the tests. Why would you build a test-specific parser for English? (source)

The important thing is of course that we get people testing, so tools shouldn't matter too much. But the added complexity still upsets me. (source)

I agree, and I'm glad that these kinds of tests have never really caught fire in the Python world. There are implementations of the RSpec and Cucumber ideas, but they don't seem to be as fully embraced. In my opinion, the dark side of testing in the Python world is the abuse of doc tests, thinking that they make both good test cases and good documentation, when in fact they're neither. There are good use cases for doc tests, but I think they've been horribly abused by certain sects within the Python world. However, even when they've been horribly abused, the people writing them seem to go after pretty broad code coverage, and they don't waste a lot of time trying to be cleverly concise (in fact, the verbosity of these large doc tests is what makes them so awful when they're also treated as documentation).

One of my main issues with RSpec and Cucumber as I've seen them in the wild is that there seems to be very few tests, and they're not terribly useful. They seem to be repeats of the classic "baby's first use case", which is "user logs in". Maybe their usage outside of the open-source world is different, but the few projects I've seen which use them have very few test cases that always has me going "that's it? you think you're tested?"

And as David points out, the complexity going on behind the scenes to make the tests just seems silly. Granted, 'Unit Tests' aren't always that easy to read, but they offer a finer example of API interactions. And if you want clarity, just add some comments. Take a cucumber-esque line like "verify that the file is encoded in UTF-8" and "now the file is encoded as latin-1" and put them as comments above the test/assert/verify statements that prove that line.

RSpec and Cucumber feel like the kinds of fiddly things that get in the way of doing real work - you can spend a lot of time writing all the back-end support to get a single test to read like an english Haiku. Or you can spend time writing a good battery of tests that actually get good coverage of the system.

24.3.11. Forget distraction free, I want file-management free!

A few years back I downloaded an interesting piece of software for the Mac OS - Writeroom version 1.0. Writeroom sells itself as a "distraction free writing environment." It's main feature was that it was plain text only and could run in a full screen mode with default colors of being green text on black background. There was some fanfare around it and some skepticism. Personally, I liked the idea - get rid of all of the other windows, instant messages, dancing gifs, email notifications, etc, and just write.

This is something which I like about the iPad - only the current application has my attention. I hope that this doesn't change. I do not like what I see in Android 3.0, nor what little I've seen of the Blackberry Playbook. Their interfaces look too busy. I deal with busy interfaces all day. For me, the iPad is a relief from the world of current desktop computing.

My favorite key combination on Mac OS X is option-command-h, aka Hide Others. When the screen starts filling up with windows and more windows and more windows, Hide Others temporarily brings some order to the madness.

Back to Writeroom. My favorite feature of 1.0 was actually not this 'distraction free writing environment' nonsense. That was a useful feature, to be sure. But the feature I liked most was that it was a file management free writing environment. Writeroom 1.0 managed its own files. There was no saving, no filename choosing (the document name was taken from the first line of the document). This made it a perfect place for just jotting things down, working small ideas out, and maybe taking them into bigger things. That file management free writing environment was bliss, at least for my uses. Every time you opened the app, there were all your documents. You could close them to hide them, but they were easily accessible from a menu and a keyboard shortcut.

There were some other apps that offered similar features - the Stickies application that comes with Mac OS X (and dates back to Mac OS System 7.5) is another nice tool for temporarily holding small pieces of information without having to worry about file management; Yojimbo is a collection bucket of notes, PDFs, etc, and can be another place for notes to quickly go; and Apple Mail in Mac OS X 10.5 added Notes which could be stored in IMAP (and can finally sync to the Notes app in iOS 4) and offer a nice quick jot-down place that also takes its title from the first line.

Writeroom 2.0 killed this feature. I avoided writeroom 2.0, but when version 2.5 was on the Mac App Store at a temporary discount, I bought it. And I hate it. Now I have to think about filenames. Now I have to think about where things are being stored. Writeroom 1.0 allowed you to easily export a document out, but that kind of decision was usually made AFTER you were finished with the document. There are times when I don't want to think about that stuff when starting out. This is not true for all cases - much of my day work is spent in TextMate writing Python code, reStructuredText documents, and managing configuration files. Of course I need full file management in that situation. But when it comes to just writing down some notes, capturing some ideas, and maybe thinking through a proposal, I miss that Writeroom 1.0 functionality.

And again, this is something that the iPad (and iPhone) gets right, for most instances. Whether its OmniGraffle, Pages, Garageband, or the built in Notes app, starting a new document is damn easy. Saving is automatic. You just start using it.

Fortunately, the next version of Mac OS X, "Lion", looks like it offers many long overdue file/document management features for developers so that they can offer functionality closer to Writeroom 1.0. Again - I'll always need TextMate and some apps to do manual file management, but those uses are specialized and becoming more rare. Mac OS X Lion adds support now for auto-save, reversion, locking, and historical change tracking. In some ways, this feels like going back to some of the ideas explored in the LISA and other pre-Mac user interfaces that weren't shackled to the hardware limitations of the original Mac OS (file management in the Lisa OS was quite a bit different - everything started from the finder, including new documents). In other ways, it feels like we're catching up to what the Newton OS, Palm OS, and iOS devices have long done in their aims of imitating paper notebooks and planners - everything is just saved, automatically.

It's not perfect for every situation, but it's something I've long been wanting in more places than just calendar and contact apps.