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Friday, June 05, 2009

On Clojure, Testing the Implementation, and Protecting Your Investment

Over on the Object Mentor blog, Dean Wampler writes about the Clojure
programming language and the designer's stand on testing the
implementation. Dean writes that...

"TDD provides two important benefits
* Driving the design.
* Building a suite of automated regression tests. "

But another important benefit of a good collection of tests is communication.

Clojure is a fine Lisp in many ways. I personally would hesitate to
use it for anything in which I had a significant investment given the
maintainer's stand on testing. At least not without a good deal of
evidence that Clojure will continue to be maintainable and understood
(at the implementation level in particular) by more than one person.

Maybe his approach will work over a long period of time, and for a
user community that will rely on Clojure for many heavy-duty, valuable
production uses. I cannot say that it won't.

I can only say that for _me_ this would be a significant reason to
hesitate before taking too significant of a plunge.

And that's saying something because I am a veteran of programming in
various Lisps for 29 years, and Lisp generally is my favorite
language. I love that Clojure has rejuvenated interest in Lisp.

http://blog.objectmentor.com/articles/2009/06/05/rich-hickey-on-testing

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About Me

Portland, Oregon, United States
I'm usually writing from my favorite location on the planet, the pacific northwest of the u.s. I write for myself only and unless otherwise specified my posts here should not be taken as representing an official position of my employer. Contact me at my gee mail account, username patrickdlogan.