[self-interest] UnitTesting

[Jecel Assumpcao Jr.]

Jan-Paul Bultmann wrote:

> Hey,
> I noticed that Self does not have a unit-testing Framework.

True.

> In Smalltalk test driven development is a fundamental part of the  
> system, at least as far as I know.

It is now a major part of Smalltalk and other language frameworks. The
rise of agile programming methods is one factor that has made unit
testing more popular.

> So were there just more important things to do or is this a design  
> choice?
> Are unit-tests useless in the self world or is there a better thing  
> I'm just missing :)?

It is important to remember that the Self project was killed way back in
1995. David Ungar continued to improve things on his own and was finally
able to release his changes in 2000. More improvements were done by
Dave's team as part of the Kline project until that was killed in 2006.
As far as I know, Russell Allen is behind most of the changes since
then.

A result of this history is that many things in Self are frozen as they
were back in 1995. If you look at the built in web browser, for example,
it doesn't even understand tables. I would say that the lack of a unit
test framework is due to the same thing.

In Self, a unit testing framework would probably be more elegant than in
Smalltalk since it is so much easier to create unique objects.

-- Jecel