alt Hacker NewsSo is reviewing and verifying code. Maybe not twice as "hard" if you're skilled in such things. But most programmers I've worked with can't be bothered to write tests let alone verify correctness by other means (good tests, property tests, types, model checking, etc).
It's one thing to point out small trivialities like initialization and life time issues in a small piece of code. But it's quite another to prove they don't exist in a large code base.
Kernigan is a good source of quotes and thinking on programming.
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eweise • today at 4:49 PM
I haven't worked in a codebase in 20 years that didn't have some sort of tests.
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I am fascinated by the prevalence of wanting "tests" from hacker news comments. Most of the code I have worked on in the past 20 years did not have tests. Most of it was shopping carts, custom data transformation code, orchestrating servers, plugin code functionality to change some aspect of a website.
Now, I have had to do some salesforce apex coding and the framework requires tests. So I write up some dummy data of a user and a lead and pass it through the code, but it feels of limited value, almost like just additional ceremony. Most of the bugs I see are from a misconception of different users about what a flag means. I can not think of a time a test caught something.
The organization is huge and people do not go and run all the code every time some other area of the system is changed. Maybe they should? But I doubt that would ever happen given the politics of the organization.
So I am curious, what are the kinds of tests do people write in other areas of the industry?