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Rich Hickey: "Simple Made Easy" from Strange Loop 2011 [video]

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Re: Rich Hickey: "Simple Made Easy" from Strange Loop 2011 [video]

#4

Post by gregwebs »

A good talk. Leave it to a lisper though to call testing and type-checking "guardrail programming". Hickey says instead you should reason about your programming without acknowledging that testing and type-checking are ways to have executable documentation of your reasoning about your program. Testing does in fact feedback into complexity - if something is hard to test it may be due to complexity that you realize you should get rid of.

Re: Rich Hickey: "Simple Made Easy" from Strange Loop 2011 [video]

#6

Post by abscondment »

jhickner wrote: post #5
ironchef wrote: post #3

Ugh. Why don't they release the presos as opposed to having to deal with synchronous video?

If you mean just the slides, most of them are in this github repo: https://github.com/strangeloop/2011-slides

For some reason, these slides are only available in a flash widget that's synchronized with the video. Here's a little script to grab the flash and build a PDF for yourself.

ImageMagick and swftools required.

  #!/bin/bash
  for s in {1..39}; do wget http://www.infoq.com/resource/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/en/slides/$s.swf; done
  for swf in *.swf; do swfrender $swf -o $swf.png && rm $swf; done
  convert `ls *.png -x1 | sort -n | xargs echo` slides.pdf
  rm -f *.swf.png
[Edit: required packages]

Re: Rich Hickey: "Simple Made Easy" from Strange Loop 2011 [video]

#7

Post by postfuturist »

gregwebs wrote: post #4

A good talk. Leave it to a lisper though to call testing and type-checking "guardrail programming". Hickey says instead you should reason about your programming without acknowledging that testing and type-checking are ways to have executable documentation of your reasoning about your program. Testing does in fact feedback into complexity - if something is hard to test it may be due to complexity that you realize you…

He says relying on tests and type-checking to verify a program still does the right thing after making changes is "guardrail programming".

Re: Rich Hickey: "Simple Made Easy" from Strange Loop 2011 [video]

#9

Post by stuarthalloway »

gregwebs wrote: post #4

A good talk. Leave it to a lisper though to call testing and type-checking "guardrail programming". Hickey says instead you should reason about your programming without acknowledging that testing and type-checking are ways to have executable documentation of your reasoning about your program. Testing does in fact feedback into complexity - if something is hard to test it may be due to complexity that you realize you…

Difficulty of writing a test can certainly be a complexity indicator, but in my experience the evidence is against testing having served this purpose very well to date, at least for the kinds of complexity addressed in this talk.

If you look at around 31:27 in the talk, you will see ten complex things, with proposed simple alternatives. If testing helped people feel the pain of complexity and discover simple things, we would see projects where people had problems writing tests, and switched strategies as a result.

Do you see people moving from the complexity column to the simplicity column in any of these ten areas as a result of writing good tests? I don't. What I see is people cheerfully enhancing testing tools to wrestle with the complexity. Consider the cottage industry around testing tools: fixtures, factories, testing lifecycle methods, mocks, stubs, matchers, code generators, monkey patching, special test environments, natural language DSLs, etc. These testing tools are valuable, but they would be a lot more valuable if they were being applied against the essential complexity of problems, rather than the incidental complexity of familiar tools.

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