

The Once and Future Rubinius - gpxl
http://rubini.us/2013/10/11/the-once-and-future-rubinius

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joe_the_user
As I recall, Rubinius did things like attempt to document the Ruby Language
through a series of test suites rather than the standard formal methods (Edit:
they did have the quandary that Ruby had without much exact specifications but
still, no number of test by themselves can formally capture a language).

Having play with "Test Driven Development" just a bit, I feel like it tended
to involve a lot of arrogant posturing with a flavor of "who needs design, who
needs formal specs, if you've got the balls to write test and dive into the
code, you can do anything without knowing anything".

It's not entirely unpleasant to see such reasoning break on the shoals of
reality.

Edit: This sounds mean spirited but it seems like tail of the problems of
2007-8 programming styles.

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nwmcsween
Because formal specs are open to interpretation, have you seen how much POSIX
formal specs differ between operating systems?

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pjmlp
Sadly yes, as I wrote UNIX portable code in 1997 - 2002 timeframe.

Unfortunely many on HN tend to think all UNIX are alike, which just shows how
little have experiece writing portable UNIX system software.

