Hi Yanni, Thank you for sharing your story. It gives another view on history. Maybe you should share it with a wider audience. As always, the people publishing about something for the first time get the credits. When I wrote "Nobody thought about automating that process. Until Kent Beck did.â, I meant that he was the one who published about SUnit for the first time (and that is why I linked to the publication). I am sure that many other people, like you and George, had tools to automate tests, in one form or another. After all, Smalltalkers build their own tools to automate repetitive tasks. That is a super power Smalltalkers have compared to developers using other programming languages. You write about 1993. Back then, it was hard to share code/projects/software with the world. These days, people put their code in a public repo. But still that does not prove that the underlying ideas are original. It just proves that they did something creative with those ideas, just like in 1993. But at least it is clear for the rest of the community who is building software based on those ideas. So I think publishing work â even early work â, in the form of code or written documents, is crucial to keep a trace of where ideas originate. Thanks again for sharing. I like stories about the history of software development and I enjoyed your story. Best regards, Koen
On 22 Nov 2024, at 23:10, Yanni Chiu <yannix7db@gmail.com> wrote:
The blog post has "Nobody thought about automating that process. Until Kent Beck did." That is not accurate, AFAIK. I believe it was in Kent Beck's original EXtreme Programming book where he says the practices were gathered from various Smalltalk shops he consulted at during the Smalltalk heyday in the early 90's.
For what it's worth, here's the history I know. Around 1993, in Toronto, I was working at Footprint Software on VisualBanker (a suite of code to support banking that 4 of the 5 major Canadian banks bought). With my programming buddy (no "pair programming" at the time) our task was to build a persistence framework (supporting Relational, ObjectFiler, and in-memory).
My task in a previous job was to convert (the AT&T Unix) C compiler to support the "new" ANSI C standard. Thankfully, I was provided with a test suite of C code, so that if it compiled without errors, then the compiler was standard compliant. So, looking for something similar to the ANSI C test suite I'd encountered, I set up test cases where all methods starting with "test" would be run, and ran the tests against all the backend data stores. The next day, my programming buddy (George), who started at 6am (to have a faster commute) tells me this test thing is great, and shows me the UI he built so we could just push a button. We can check the same behaviour for all backends, and we can coordinate our code changes through the tests (to mitigate our different schedule).
A year later, the company's product was deemed slow, so they contracted Kent Beck to review our code base. He eventually comes around to us. We showed him what we did with tests, and then he just paused for about a minute staring out the window. We thought we were doing something really bad. A few months later, George said to me "did you see the SUnit thing posted on comp.lang.smalltalk". The basic "test"-prefixed test cases were there, but with the addition of the setUp and tearDown concept.
Every once in a while I think to write this up. The "Nobody thought about automating..." words pushed me over this time. Maybe 15 years ago, I was able to find the original comp.lang.smalltalk SUnit posting, but could not locate it this time when I wanted to verify the dates.
Yanni Chiu, Smalltalk oldtimer, Toronto
On Fri, Nov 22, 2024 at 8:58â¯AM Koen De Hondt <koen@all-objects-all-the-time.st> wrote:
Dear Pharo users and developers,
I wrote a blog post in which I evaluate SUnit.
Enjoy reading it!
Ciao, Koen