[racket-dev] RFC: Coding Guidelines

... whoops, sent too soon.

I would say that there is some code where we know how to test it and
laziness is the only thing that keeps it from being tested. There is
other code, however, where it is something more than laziness that
keeps it from being well-tested, ie testing it is a large programming
project in its own right. DrRacket is in that category, but I spend
some energy writing and maintaining test suites for it regardless
(they are FAR from comprehensive). Slideshow is in that category too.

Robby

On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 8:55 AM, Robby Findler
<robby at eecs.northwestern.edu> wrote:
> But that's not true for Matthew, say, who has volumes of course slides
> in slideshow that he uses each year. (I think he's the biggest
> slideshow client, tho.)
>
> Slideshow is not an easy thing to test, I'd say. One could probably,
> with sufficient work, build something that would reveal properties of
> picts and then test for them with the combinators, but it would be
> something on the level of complexity of the framework's test engine,
> roughly speaking.
>
> Robby
>
> On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 8:53 AM, Matthias Felleisen
> <matthias at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
>>
>> There's code and there's code. I don't think slideshow is at the level of Racket or Typed Racket or DrRacket. If it went away, I'd have no trouble changing the ten or twenty files in my world that use it. Sure, I'd lose a few days but if I lost Racket, I'd lose a year and more.
>>
>> -- Matthias
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Aug 19, 2010, at 9:50 AM, Casey Klein wrote:
>>
>>> On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 8:44 AM, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt <samth at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
>>>> On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 3:57 PM, Jay McCarthy <jay.mccarthy at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> Please comment.
>>>>
>>>> I think that this:
>>>>
>>>> "Your first task when changing old code is to build an adequate test
>>>> suite to ensure you do not introduce new mistakes as you attempt to
>>>> improve it. Thank you for improving the world for future generations!"
>>>>
>>>> is too demanding.  There are enormous areas of our code that don't
>>>> have a test suite.  How comprehensive a test suite do I need before
>>>> changing slideshow?  Or scribble (which has a test suite for the
>>>> syntax, but not the language)?
>>>
>>> Robby and Matthew, would Slideshow exist today if you'd be expected to
>>> build it with this process?
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>>
>>
>