Comment by AdieuToLogic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AdieuToLogic | Hacker News Reader

> In 2022 I started working on Freewheeling Apps. I started out with no tests, got frustrated at some point and wrote thorough tests for a core piece, the text editor.

This is a primary motivation for having a reasonable test suite - limiting frustration. Test suites gives developers confidence to evolve a system. When done properly, contributors often form an opinion similar to:

> But I struggled to find ways to test the rest, and also found I was getting by fine anyway.

This is also a common situation. As functional complexity increases, the difficulty to test components or the system as a whole can become prohibitive.

> Now it's 2024, and a month ago I deleted all my tests. ... In effect I stopped thinking about version control. Giving up tests and versions, I ended up with a much better program.

This philosophy does not scale beyond one person and said person having recent, intimate, memory of all decisions encoded in source code (current or historical). Furthermore, given intimate implementation knowledge, verifying any change by definition must be performed manually.

> This philosophy does not scale beyond one person ... having recent, intimate, memory of all decisions encoded in source code

Some time ago on HN, I ran across a tale of someone who never merged code unless they'd written it all that day. If they got to the end of the day without something mergeable, well, that just meant they didn't understand the problem well enough to express it in under a day, and they tried afresh the following morning.

Anyone else remember this, or am I confusing sites/anecdotes again?

> This philosophy does not scale beyond one person and said person having recent, intimate, memory of all decisions encoded in source code (current or historical). Furthermore, given intimate implementation knowledge, verifying any change by definition must be performed manually.

As a one-man programming team, you are correct. And quite frankly, I shudder to think of not programming with a test suite or version control, even though I work alone!

Docs, tests, and version control reduce what I have to remember about the code context. Yes, I have to remember the details of the code in front of me, but if I document it, test it, and check it in with a good commit message describing the why and how and whatever, then I can discard that code from my memory and move on to the next thing.

All of the tools and artifacts you reference as important contribute to the same goal, whether it is for me or a future-you:

Understanding.

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