

Professionalism in Python or: How To Not Do Bad Things - mapleoin
http://artificialcode.blogspot.com/2010/04/professionalism-in-python-or-how-to-not.html

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mkramlich
He lost me at his extreme advocation for unit tests. I won't rehash the
arguments against them here but the short story is that there is an additional
burden in writing and maintaining them, and many of their benefits can be had
through other means. I agree with the gist of the rest of his points, which
were mostly about reducing complexity. Unfortunately, unit tests increase
complexity. They aren't a free lunch.

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wanderr
I had the same reaction. Unit tests mean you have twice as much code to change
when requirements change. And in my experience, whenever a unit test fails you
have to spend a lot of time debugging the test itself to make sure the failure
is even valid.

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hga
Hmmm, the last two points about humility and "solving the dirty problems"
could very generally apply to the Lisp community as well.

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l0nwlf
The talk by Robert Martin - 'What killed Smalltalk, could kill Ruby too'
mentioned in the blog was fantastic

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regularfry
What's the reference to the film industry at the end talking about? I'm not
active in Python-land, so that went over my head.

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johkra
It appears the author used Python while working for the film industry, see for
instance the previous post in the blog:
[http://artificialcode.blogspot.com/2010/04/my-midlife-
python...](http://artificialcode.blogspot.com/2010/04/my-midlife-python-
quality-crisis.html)

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ableal
In that one, G. van Rossum drops in to make a suggestion in the comments ...

Both posts are worth the time.

P.S. some people do not realize that a sizeable part of the core Python
developers were/are C++ coders who wanted some sanity (or so I gathered about
8 years ago, when facing the same problem ;-).

