alt Hacker News> Some unit testing frameworks expect their users to use assertions to do the job, others are very much against it because they want to separate between the failures of the system under test from failures of the test. (If that matters, I'm in the later camp).
How useful is this distinction in practice? A failing test is going to examined in detail and that examination is going to reveal whether the system under test failed or if the test itself failed.
I guess I am asking, when is this distinction useful?
A typical place this distinction is useful is that it determines whether the test-suite runs to completion with multiple tests, or panics/terminates hard on the first failure.