I can't upvote this enough.
It breaks my heart when I see a manager with some engineering background, whose idea of better is to make the code coverage number higher.
It breaks my heart when I see a manager with some engineering background, whose idea of better is to make the code coverage number higher.
People here have great arguments against tests. I agree that they’re not always useful. Aiming for 100% code coverage is a waste of time.
But if a manager wants easily measurable metrics to hit and they have the budget and bandwidth for it, why should I complain?
Writing tests is easy, predictable work. My rate is my rate and if this is how management dictates I spend my time, I’ll take an easy couple weeks and paychecks any day.
But is it useful work? This is the problem: engineers have at some point decided that keeping busy writing tests is better than finding other ways to write correct code.
Now that TDD has died down as a religion the current fad became strong typing. I will repeat it again and again, I have yet to see an error caused by me passing an int where an array-type was expected in Python or JavaScript. I have been doing this for a long time. This too shall pass and we will see posts like “Show HN: new lightweight dialect of XYZ without the burden of types”.
You will discover that you reversed the order for parameters to a function by running your code with much less effort than annotating all your code. This type annotation is entirely useless:
def get_user(email: str, create_if_not_exists: bool)If you don't have tests, all that means is you or somebody else is testing it manually.
Ah, the Sufficiently Smart IDE, companion to the Sufficiently Smart Compiler. Sure, go ahead and wait for the magic autocomplete algorithm that can deduce precise function signatures in a large Python or JavaScript code base.
Meanwhile, some of us have work to do, and we'll use the best tools at our disposal for managing non-trivial code written by many people across teams. And those tools include modern static type systems.
Python was my first programming language(cliche, I know) and I didn't understand the whole "static typing is good" thing until I learnt languages like C, C++, C#, and rust.
Python also introduced type hints and made them a valid part of syntax for good reason. You'd typically end up writing a docstring with the return type of a function and the types of the parameters anyway, which is what the person replying to you was presumably referring to.
It's not about passing in an int instead of an array, but rather but being able to figure out what a function wants without needing a stackoverflow thread or having to search through tons of documentation for something that would be otherwise trivial in statically typed languages where the function declaration tells you quite a bit about a function.
Hence it's safe to say that types documented in code in some way are very useful for humans, and if you have issues with statically typed programming languages, there's a chance you were not documenting your code enough already.
We feel it "funny" because that culture is perpendicular to the Startup culture that abounds in this forum. But number-wise, it's a minority.
The great majority of people are not wholly in love with their craft. They just want to do their job to get paid. They dont read about Rust on weekends, and dont program yet-another-X in their spare time.
And that Ok. Thats what the majority of the world does.
I would rather my employees (and contractors!) work on what's actually valuable, and not just take blind instruction. The people closest to the code should be most empowered to improve it. Is that not a common management view?