<div dir="ltr">I just want to chime in to defend Cucumber, which I use in Ruby at my day job. I see a lot of people put up the strawman that it can only be used as a way for business people to write acceptance tests. That idea is questionable and I've never worked at a company big enough to require that, or with business people who have ever wanted to write my tests for me.<div>
<br></div><div>In Ruby, I use Cucumber purely for myself to drive high level acceptance tests for products. I think the sweet spot for it is when you're starting work on a high level feature and you have NO idea how it will be implemented or even how it will work in detail. I find that writing in the limited language that Gherkin provides keeps my brain from going right to implementation details. I write out tests that explore how the system should work. I write them in the perspective of the user (which you should be doing in your head regardless because the user is the one who will actually interact with your program). I then read them back and make sure they make logical sense. Only then do I start hooking up the steps I wrote to code that drives integration/acceptance tests, via a browser for instance. At the end I have a failing cucumber test that describes the system in an intuitive manner with zero line noise (programming language syntax). I am now free to think about implementation details, write lower level unit tests and implement things that can be described in much less verbose fashion. I really like that process and if I ever had a job to develop products in Haskell, I'd probably take a similar approach.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Do note that I advocate using Cucumber to create/drive user stories, not to unit test low level functions like folds. If you don't have a customer of a particular function who could describe how they interact with it in layman's term, then Cucumber is the wrong tool. Use quickcheck/hunit/hspec for that.</div>
</div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 3:42 PM, Bob Ippolito <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:bob@redivi.com" target="_blank">bob@redivi.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
Have you tried AppleScript? I wouldn't say it's pleasant to use, but it's easy to read. <div class="HOEnZb"><div class="h5"><br><br>On Thursday, September 12, 2013, David Thomas wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div dir="ltr">I've long been interested in a scripting language designed to be spoken. Not interested enough to go about making it happen... but the idea is fascinating and possibly useful.<br></div><div class="gmail_extra">
<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 2:57 PM, Andreas Abel <span dir="ltr"><<a>andreas.abel@ifi.lmu.de</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<u></u>
<div>
<p>+1</p>
<p>Cucumber seems to be great if you mainly want to read your code over the telephone, distribute it via national radio broadcast, or dictate it to your secretary or your voice recognition software. You can program thus without having to use you fingers. You can lie on your back on your sofa, close your eyes, and utter your programs...</p>
<p>We could have blind Haskell/Cucumber programming contests...</p>
<p>Tons of new possiblilities...</p>
<p>Strongly support this proposal. ;-)</p>
<p>Andreas</p><div><div>
<p>On 2013-09-10 22:57, Artyom Kazak wrote:</p>
<blockquote type="cite" style="padding-left:5px;border-left:#1010ff 2px solid;margin-left:5px;width:100%">
<pre>On Wed, 11 Sep 2013 00:20:26 +0400, Thiago Negri <<a>evohunz@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</pre>
<blockquote type="cite" style="padding-left:5px;border-left:#1010ff 2px solid;margin-left:5px;width:100%">I hope these jokes do not cause people to be afraid to post new ideas.</blockquote>
<pre>Agreed. I would also like to clarify that my message was much more a joke
on
the incomprehensibility of legal acts than on the original proposal.
By the way, I am pretty impressed with this piece of Cucumber
description/code:
Scenario: Mislav creates a valid task with an upload
When I go to the "Awesome Ruby Yahh" task list page of the "Ruby
Rockstars" project
When I follow "+ Add Task"
And I fill in "Task title" with "Ohhh upload"
And I follow "Attachment"
When I attach the file "features/support/sample_files/dragon.jpg" to
"upload_file"
And I press "Add Task"
And I wait for 1 second
And I should see "Ohhh upload" as a task name
I was much more sceptical when I had only seen the example in Niklas’s
message.
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</blockquote>
<p> </p>
</div></div><span><font color="#888888"><div>
<pre>--
Andreas Abel <>< Du bist der geliebte Mensch.
Theoretical Computer Science, University of Munich <a href="http://www.tcs.informatik.uni-muenchen.de/%7Eabel/" target="_blank">http://www.tcs.informatik.uni-muenchen.de/~abel/</a></pre>
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