bytes.zone

launch ftw, part 11

Brian Hicks, July 9, 2023

Before I just jump into finding communities around property testing, I wanted to try and do a cold answer of the launch FTW questions in lesson 4 (which I've been putting off since… June 26th? Shorter than I thought, actually.) Anyway, here they are, along with my answers (cleaned up slightly.)

By the way, if you're unaware: property testing is like unit testing but with automatic test case generation. This is a straw man, but in example-based testing of an "add" method you might say "ok, add makes numbers go up" and write down pairs like 1+1, 2+20, 3+1e9. In property testing, you might say "add always makes numbers go up" and tell the system to give you any two numbers, asserting that the result is higher than both of them. Then the property testing system will immediately give you a negative number and you'll be like "oh duh."

Anyway, the questions:

This was difficult for me! It's early and I'm pretty tired and it felt like my thoughts were extra slippery. I'm glad I put the effort in to tie them down; I see some themes here around accessibility and approach here that could at least be useful products.

I think it might also be worth revisiting this exercise and putting in the effort to answer these questions for Sorbet or Formal Methods. I've been in a (broadly-published) blogging drought recently and it seems like this could generate good ideas for that, too.

Next time I'm going to go out and if I can find reasonably-sized communities around property testing. I was able to find a few things immediately but I want to dig in more.

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