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Comment by ithinkso | Hacker News Reader

Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time...

Burn. It. With. Fire.

I was at Nokia and we used robot, what an absolute pain it was

I was also in nokia and we where pitched to use RF - at the time, we (well, i) made a decision of not to use it - mainly because our actual testing tool was implemented in ruby and using remote library wasnt really possible for our scenario and also i didnt like the test data format then (we where pitched to use a frigin EXCEL or html tables) ..

Things have changed a lot from those times though and I am somewhat happy camper with robot in its current state. Its not without its warts but definitely has come a long way since "nokia days".

Same here, hello from ex-Nokia Networks GmbH and NectAct migration into Java project. :)

I don't miss Robot at all.

Well, I don't know how things were back then, but Robot Framework had many changes in the latest times, so, it's possible things improved from there (thus your past experiences may not match the current state of affairs).

I'd say that it does have some quirks, but if well used it can be a good tool to have in your toolbox.

Disclaimer: I'm currently working on the Robot Framework Language Server extension for VSCode (by Robocorp, which uses Robot Framework to work with RPA -- albeit Robocorp supports well both Python as well as Robot Framework in the platform, there's a high traction on the Robot Framework side and many users enjoy it vs using just Python).

Back in the early Robot days you would write the tests on a tabular form, HTML based.

The Python code would parse those HTML tables to execute the code, lovely.

Most common was afaik Excel with export to CSV or TSV, though some people started with Robot IDE (circa 2015-2016 was my last contact)

My last contact with Robot was in 2007.

Also ex-Nokia employee (in PL) here. I see all of us share the same "love" to RF

The hardware people at my job love it.

Maybe we used it incorrectly but for testing SW on target it's the worst thing I have ever experienced. The 'human readable' keywords are a hidden evil no one should meet. And the sheer amount of them, matched with random Setups and Teardowns, wierd syntax workarounds to do simple stuff, performance...

What would you rather use for end-to-end acceptance testing? Pabot runs multiple robot tests in parallel, meaning dozens of tests can run in a few minutes. It seems acceptable if you start with the assumption that acceptance testing part of the pipeline doesn't need to be run on every commit.

Yeah this is my experience as well, I understand the appeal, hell I was even the one to frontrun/poc it 6 years ago. But in the end it's just worse dev experience, no sane Keywords autocomplete/lookup in any IDE out there(by that time).

In the end you end up programming inside english like DSL with weird quirks, that's somewhere connected to python, with different variable syntax, and not really good debugging.

I guess everyone has to pass through that stage at least once, but I will never go back to it.

Well, nowadays Robot Framework Language Server (which I develop) does have autocomplete/semantic analysis/interactive console/debugger (which can debug Python and Robot Framework at the same time) and a bunch of other things, so, I guess things did improve a bit in the meanwhile...

I suspected LSP would be awesome for it, but nothing existed like 3 years ago - kudos to you sir, I think it would make the experience 10x better.

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