Comments on: Choosing between Dogmatism or Denial

By: The Web Gambit » Comparing the Ruby and .NET ecosystems

The Web Gambit » Comparing the Ruby and .NET ecosystems — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:11:26 +0000

[...] mentioned in my previous post that I believed much of the backlash against TDD is more technical in nature than many in the .NET [...]

By: Karthik Hariharan

Karthik Hariharan — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 22:14:32 +0000

Thanks for the comment, Jim! I agree with everything you've said and I've been very impressed with the Rubyists attitude regarding unit testing. Let me know what you think of my follow up post here: http://webgambit.com/2009/11/26/comparing-the-r...

By: Jim Holmes

Jim Holmes — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 10:57:49 +0000

I'm late coming across your post, but I'd be interested in what you find in the Rails community. Having been around a number of very accomplished Rubyists for some time, I can tell you their reaction to this silly angst we folks in the .NET domain have: they shake their heads and go back to doing TDD/BDD/context-driven development.

Neal Ford, Jim Weirich, Glenn Vanderburg, and less renowned but still highly accomplished Rubyists all have the same mindset. *NONE* of these folks put up with the attitude that it's OK to not test.

There's no arguing about the value of tests because they understand it already. There's no heated debates about why one should test because they grok the benefits. Best of all there's no religious wars about it because, for the most part, the attitudes of Rubyists just don't shake out like that.

It's just how it is, and it's awfully refreshing -- because that mindset and approach to craftsmanship is simply just a part of how that community does its work.

(Of course there are segments of the Ruby community that don't work that way, but those segments are much smaller and much less vocal.)