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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

I've never understood the fascination with cucumber. If you've got a customer in the loop actively working on or reviewing acceptance tests, cucumber is very nice. If you don't, then cucumber is a big waste of time. For some reason, cucumber was the ruby/rails "meme of the day" for a while. BDD is awesome. Webrat is awesome. So if cucumber is your first exposure to those two, then cucumber seems awesome. Do yourself a favor and try BDD & Webrat without cucumber.

If steak becomes the meme of the day, at least it isn't actively harmful like cucumber was.

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In defense of Cucumber, I've been a rails developer for more than 2 years and I still find it easier to read English than Ruby. I think the extra layer of abstraction is well worth the effort when reading over other people's tests.

Have you actually used Webrat? It reads English with extra punctuation. Here's an example from a test I happen to have open at this exact moment:

    visit "/special_recipes/new"
    fill_in "special_recipe[name]", :with => "Pie"
    select "Test User", :from => "special_recipe[user_id]"
    click_button "Create Special Recipe"

The mind naturally skips the punctuation. It actually reads easier than some Cucumber tests I've seen.

If you are going to make a blanket offhand statement like:

"actively harmful like cucumber was"

I think you should provide some basis for that. Some examples of how you think cucumber is harmful.

Cucumber is very expensive -- it requires you to maintain a set of rules to map English to ruby. And it causes people to continually fiddle with stuff just so that the English reads write. And it adds an abstraction layer, which are also "expensive".

Great expense, little gain -> actively harmful to projects.

You end up spending lots of "testing time" fiddling with cucumber stuff. It feels productive, but you'd have more, better tests writing straight into webrat

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