Comments on: 2nd London Python Dojo & TDD

By: Tartley

Tartley — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:48:05 +0000

Very true that there is much fuzziness. Maybe this is a lesson we can learn - that people might actually get more out of we set everyone’s expectations in the same direction by trying to define more tightly what the dojo is aimed at. I wouldn’t want to narrow the scope of the dojos down to just one thing, I am thus far enjoying the organic and scattershot approach. Maybe though, there is mileage in an organiser saying “*this* dojo is to demonstrate X and Y. Future dojos may be about somethign else.”

I’ll chat with peeps about this at the Pyssup tonight.

By: tim

tim — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 11:51:08 +0000

@Tartley: thanks for the response, Jonathan. Your point about using the Dojo to illustrate certain techniques, eg a slight refactoring of code to facilitate a particular testing paradigm, is perfectly sound. I just think that there’s a certain fuzziness due to the fact that everyone has a slightly different intuition about what the Dojo should be about.

Part of the issue is, obviously, that you have one pilot, one co-pilot and 20+ backseat pilots. And no-one’s giving authoritative “this the best way because…” advice; it’s just a melee of noise and advice.

By: Tartley

Tartley — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 09:39:37 +0000

Hey there Tim.

Fair points all over. I do believe it was I who made the particular suggestion to return a string rather than printing it, because that would be easier to test.

My justification would be that, in my understanding, one significant point of the dojo is to practice and demonstrate the use of development and refactoring techniques, such as TDD, without the distractions of real-world complexities.

So we choose an extremely simple and small problem, and apply those techniques to it. In a real world scenario, we would not need to, because the problem is so simple. But here, we do anyway, because the point is not to solve the problem in exactly the same way you would solve that problem in real life. The point is to demonstrate and practice the techniques that, later, you would use in the thick of a real-world problem.

So, I think that my suggestion of returning strings instead of printing them is an example of recognising that some code is hard to test, whereas functional code is much easier to test, and modifying your production code accordingly to make it easy to test. This is, to my mind, precisely what the dojo is for. It may not have been necessary, but it exemplified somethign that people will absolutely find useful in other, more complex, scenarios.

Make any sense, do you think?

Big hugs!

Jonathan

By: Paul Boddie

Paul Boddie — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 15:00:57 +0000

“At one point it was suggested that a particular function should return a string rather than print it to the screen as it would be easier to form a test.”

A million turtles later: “Are we ready to print to the screen now?”

;-)