Hacker News Reader

Comment by mordocai | Hacker News Reader

Is there anything that actually "enforces" TDD? Because if there is I want to stay away from it.

Yes. Being forced to push changes to production with zero test coverage, and hence zero confidence in your code on a Friday night. (true story)

After that you always make sure test exist before even pondering a push of potentially breaking changes! :P

Oh yeah, I mean I always write tests for anything for work. I don't do TDD all the time though, sometimes I write the tests after the code. A language/framework that forced me to do TDD would just piss me off, which was my original point.

I was being tongue in cheek on that one, sorry if it didn't come across that way. Although I've been a Rails dev for 6 years now, I've come to hate the TDD approach and am a convert of FP and types, & compilers a la Haskell. Because there really is no such thing as a massive change in FP IMO. Unfortunately I'm not competent enough in it yet so Rails still pays the bills.

My "enforcing TDD" point was rather tongue in cheek. Really, I was just saying that a rails app of even moderate complexity with no tests is a very dangerous beast, and something I would not wish upon my worst enemies.

Indeed.

You can remove the word "rails" from that, and it's still 100% true.

True, but I think that with rails and a few dozen gems one can bolt together a terribly architected app that on the surface seems to work but is in fact a bunch of spaghetti and lasagna code bolted together with duct tape, teetering on the edge of a cliff like a house of cards; checkmate.

(sorry, couldn't help the futurama/zap branigan reference once I start mixing metaphors).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com