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Comment by pmarreck | Hacker News Reader

it’s a pretty long read... clearly the author did not learn brevity in his coding, or that his blog’s color scheme does not contribute to readability

also re: Gherkin: Just don’t cucumber. If you focus on integration test technology like Cucumber or headless browser drivers, they will absolutely balloon your test suite runtime and it is partly because they are extremely inefficient (testing the same things over and over and over again such as “set up a logged-in user with 3 assets” for 90% of the test cases in the suite). Avoid. Maybe not entirely, but in large part.

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> "it’s a pretty long read... clearly the author did not learn brevity in his coding"

Brevity shouldn't be a virtue of coding. The best code is self-documenting code and self-documenting code is rarely brief.

To quote Wordpress PHP Coding Standards: In general, readability is more important than cleverness or brevity.

https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/best-practices/codi...

If you want code brevity, at all, PHP is not your language (nor is Go, nor is Java)

> it’s a pretty long read... clearly the author did not learn brevity in his coding, or that his blog’s color scheme does not contribute to readability

It's also riddled with typos which made reading it hard. There's some wisdom in there, but it was clearly written in an editor without spell/grammar checks. Maybe there should have been a section about rereading your own work before sending to your team/prod? =)

I would guess that based on name and link to a book, he wrote, in Portuguese, that the chap's first language is not English

As a fellow not native speaker I don’t think this should matter the moment you choose to use English. Also, personally, it wasn’t just the grammar that put me off but also all the aggressive colloquialism used.

I give non-native speakers a lot more leeway for typos, grammar and odd expressions for, hopefully, obvious reasons.

A lot of people use English as it's the language of tech, which means that the potential audience is significantly larger.

> Turn off comments

There should be a way to vet negative people in some way that comments wouldn't be toxic

>If you focus on integration test technology like Cucumber or headless browser drivers, they will absolutely balloon your test suite runtime and it is partly because they are extremely inefficient

Between unit tests (fast, unrealistic, tightly coupled, catches fewer bugs) and integration tests (slower, more realistic and catches more bugs) I virtually always pick the latter.

I'm happy to trade CPU churn for "catches more bugs". CPU time is cheap.

It is not a dichotomy.

Ideally you’ll have lots of unit tests and a few integration tests, all valid.

I’m scarred by seeing test suite runtimes (THE most important element of programmer productivity IMHO) completely balloon after focusing too much on integration tests. There is a world of productivity difference between a 1 minute test suite and a 40 minute (or 4 day) test suite

>It is not a dichotomy.

It is a dichotomy. You do not want the same thing being covered by two different types of test. Duplicated test coverage means duplicated maintenance.

>There is a world of productivity difference between a 1 minute test suite and a 40 minute (or 4 day) test suite

Not in my experience. Tests can easily run while I'm at lunch, overnight, working on something else or, if time is really of the essence, in parallel. If I'm running an individual test while developing anything that runs in under a minute has no effect on my productivity.

Tests that don't catch bugs are a far, far bigger deal.

Optimising for our reading effort is not a given, neither in length or style. It's a choice.

Insinuating incompetency when choice is clearly a reasonable explanation is in my opinion quite disingenuous.

If you don't like the style, at least say so clearly, if you have to. But why do you have to?

The authors tip to disable comments, I fully understand. I find writing hard, and I could never cope with all the things - except the actual text - people find the need to complain about.

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