Voidspace makes a mildly provocative post about how testing seems to be more emphasized in the Ruby community.

I'm not entirely sure I agree, but then again I'm firmly embedded in the Python testing community and I might have a slightly biased view ;).

What I am sure about is that just because Ruby folk (or really, any bloggers at all) are vehement about a topic doesn't mean that that topic is actually of great concern to anyone, even the community the bloggers come from. To put it more succinctly: just because you read more about testing in Ruby doesn't mean more people test properly in Ruby.

In fact, from what I can tell, testing -- especially agile testing techniques -- is still quite young. Despite all the consultant-driven hype that emanates from the XP community (which is GOOD) I don't think that testing has even penetrated the cortex of the software development community, much less into the reptilian inner brain. I base this opinion on two observations:

• the testing tools available to most programmers are lousy, even in Ruby and Python.
• apart from a core group of devotedly interested people, I don't get the impression that there's much of a testing community in Python. After all, testing should be pervasive throughout software development at this point... right?

So I think it's premature to conclude that any community is especially good at this, when the tools are so crappy and the discussion is so limited.

He raises a few more interesting points that I would like to address:

• Is there a compelling reason to switch to Python for Web dev?

  Yes: I would argue that WSGI and the WSGI testing tools now available (viz. wsgi_intercept and paste.fixture are important developments, because no matter what Web frameworks emerge in the future, you will have a clear path to deployment and testing. That's a longer-term guarantee than the hope that Rails does not fork or become fugly.

• Testing does create beautiful code. In fact, I think that this effect is the dominant reason that testing results in more maintainable code. More on this next time I'm feel philosophical.

• Grig does rock. People seem to underestimate the role that process plays in software development, and Grig is good at analyzing and fixing processes. (I much prefer tackling code; it's easier.)

• Hopefully the TIP list will help with the lack of community discussion. There's not much to see if Python people interested in testing don't blog about it, which seems to be the case...

Anyway, interesting post, and keep on testing!

--titus