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Comment by mooreds | Hacker News Reader

> by using English as spec, the barrier of entry has gone lower,

I'm not sure that is true. The level of back and forth and refinements needed indicate to me that the "English" used is not the normal language I use when talking to people.

It's almost like a refined version of cucumber with syntax that is slightly more forgiving.

Maybe I'm being a codger, but LLMs seem (at least for now) far better for summarizing and giving high level overviews of concepts rather than nailing precise code requirements.

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> It's almost like a refined version of cucumber with syntax that is slightly more forgiving.

I don't know if "cucumber" is autocorrupt or an actual non-vegetable thing; can you clarify?

https://cucumber.io/

That "did they actually mean that or was it autowrong?" feeling is going to get worse I fear.

Not a typo.[0]

In the 00s/early 10s, software went through a fad phase where people earnestly thought that by implementing Gherkin frameworks like Cucumber, you'd be able to hand off writing tests to "business people" in "plain English." It went about as well as you'd expect.

[0] https://cucumber.io/docs/gherkin/

Thanks!

Despite that period being when I finished my Software Engineering degree, got my first job, and then attempted self-employment, I'd never heard of it before.

Looking at the book titles — "Cucumber Recipes" in particular — even if I had encountered it, I might have assumed the whole thing was a joke.

I still think the basic idea of Cucumber and similar tools is sound. It just doesn't match how 99% of companies operate.

On the other hand, many developers write shitty tests where it's absolutely unclear what the test is even trying to achieve, so trying to find some sort of framework which tries to forcibly decouple the what of the test from the how maybe isn't the worst idea.

That's exactly what I tried to do with this framework:

https://github.com/hitchdev/examples

Rather than trying to force your testers and stakeholders to adapt to the DSL, the templated story->documentation generation lets the dev or tester adapt the DSL to whatever the stakeholders want to see while keeping the story strictly about behavior.

https://cucumber.io/docs/guides/overview/

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