Or do they?
And who are they, anyway, and who are we?
The phrase, “They don’t pay us to write tests,” comes up from time to time in conversations, in articles, in blog posts, in conference talks, and so forth. What does it mean?
Continue reading They don’t pay us to write testsThe paper “Notation as a Tool of Thought” by Kenneth E. Iverson of the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center was published in the Communications of the ACM, Volume 23, Number 8, 1980-08. It’s available online at https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm. Thanks to John Arundel (https://twitter.com/bitfield) who called attention to the paper in a tweet.
The paper deals with the way an appropriate notation influences people’s thinking in a given domain. Iverson was interested in the domain of mathematical computing, and he uses the APL language to illustrate his ideas. APL is an array-processing language Iverson developed in the 1960s. It has a following even today. You can read more about it on the APL Wiki at https://www.aplwiki.com/. You can try it out online here: https://tryapl.org/,
In this piece, I’m going to stretch the point a bit and apply some of the principles of notation Iverson presents in his article to a different domain: unit testing of application software.
Continue reading Notation and Thought in Unit Testing