[TIP] A rare philosophical thought

[Michael Foord]

Ben Finney wrote:
> "C. Titus Brown" <ctb at msu.edu> writes:
>
>   
>> And let me say,
>>
>> I HATE UNITTEST.
>>     
>
> I love the fact that it exists and works as advertised.
>
>   

I like it. The oft-cited 'boilerplate' is usually an import and a class 
definition...

At Resolver Systems we've built on unittest to create a distributed 
testing framework that pushes tests out onto several machines on a 
network, publishing results (and tracebacks) to a web application that 
allows you to view them whilst the test run is still going.

Creating custom test runners and result formatters on top of unittest 
wasn't particularly problematic - although that architecture could 
probably do with some simplifying.

>> UNITTEST IS EVIL.
>>     
>
>   

I'm aware of no justification for that statement...

> The many good points of the standard library unittest module have
> allowed me to write far better Python code than I would otherwise have
> written. It's not evil in my view.
>
> It's ugly. It's crufty. It's not PEP-8-conformant. It's mostly
> unmaintained. It can lead to rather baroque unit test modules. But it
> also has many good features, and I don't think any of the bad ones
> make it "evil".
>
>   
>> UNITTEST NEEDS TO BE REPLACED.
>>     
>
> Entirely agreed on this point. I think, though, that you'll find
> little immediate consensus on what to replace it with :-)
>
>   

Personally I disagree - although there are obvious improvements that can 
be made.

Michael

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