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Comment by yakshaving_jgt | Hacker News Reader

I don’t agree with your position on tests. I find that writing tests even for small applications saves me time. And that’s even in a language with a sophisticated type system.

I’m also not sure how much time you imagine one spends on setting up CI. In my case it’s just one file with about 20 lines in it, and I usually just copy and paste it from previous projects.

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Some people use tests as a design tool, and as a way to repeatedly execute code in a known state while developing it. In that regard, it improves upon print statements and, frankly, step-through debuggers. That it leaves behind a harness for triangulating bugs in pull requests is, of course, an invaluable side-effect.

That’s exactly my approach. I learned it from watching the Destroy All Software screencast series a decade ago. While the screencast demonstrates this with Ruby and RoR, it’s still applicable to all my work in Haskell and Yesod, despite some ideologues arguing that there is some dichotomy between types and tests.

> I’m also not sure how much time you imagine one spends on setting up CI. In my case it’s just one file with about 20 lines in it, and I usually just copy and paste it from previous projects.

The problem is when it breaks due to some versioning issue or some other easy-in-hindsight problem that saps 3-6 hours of time that could otherwise have been spent talking to users and discovering/building real features. I start to question "did I really need CI in the first place", I think the answer for non-critical apps (e.g. with a small number of users; not healthcare/banking/similar) is usually a hard "no". Other than autonomously running tests what value does CI offer?.. to me, nothing that I can think of. Not saying everyone should denounce it, just that it's very okay to say 'nope, don't need it (yet)'.

Hmm… Interesting. I use Nix so I don’t have versioning issues.

Maybe I would have if I didn’t.

3-6 hours is nothing in terms of the money you will spend on development for even a modestly funded startup. You definitely don't need to be a healthcare or banking app to quickly reap the benefits of a robust dev/deploy cycle.

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