Re: Praise of Lua from a game developer

[Philippe Lhoste <PhiLho@...>]

On 27/07/2012 17:36, Javier Guerra Giraldez wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 9:11 AM, Petri Häkkinen <petrih3@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Yeah, the biggest problem with test driven development for me is that writing test
> > code is dead boring :) Even if it would make me 2x productive (which I really doubt)
> > I probably couldn't never force myself to use it.

I won't argue on the boring argument, but testing was never made to improve productivity!
At least, not on the initial coding part.
Perhaps on the overall life cycle of the software (ie. including testing and maintenance).

Note that static checking might reduce the amount of testing to do (and probably remove 
the most boring parts), but doesn't prevent testing: Java programs are still heavily under 
unit tests, for example.

> roughly same here, writing tests for working code feels like punishment!

Yes, but of course you don't (always) write tests to ensure the current code is working 
(although it helps in testing the limits / corner cases) but to ensure that this code is 
still working after various refactoring...

> OTOH, the cool part of TDD is that you start by writing code that already uses the code
> you haven't written yet!  to me that's like skipping the hard part and going right to
> the goal  :-)  of course, then the tests fail and you have to face reality and write
> real code... but then you have very good requirements (make the tests run!)

Yes. I find BDD even more interesting with regard to this approach.

--
Philippe Lhoste
--  (near) Paris -- France
--  http://Phi.Lho.free.fr
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