• 5 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Thank you for the example. Indeed, the context did not make that clear.

    That makes me wonder what he thought he was saying. I infer something like “very few”. Or he genuinely though he had no bullets left and was wrong. I’d say that second case seems highly unlikely, but it wouldn’t totally shock me.

    I wonder whether the word is the issue or the speaker’s intent: if the speaker insists in exaggerating, then no word they use is going to convey that they aren’t exaggerating. I wouldn’t think them likely to use any word to convey that they aren’t exaggerating, because they are. I think of it like a person bent on sarcasm: you simply need to detect it somehow, then filter every word accordingly.

    That wouldn’t make the word “literally” literally ruined, but might instead merely indicate that we can’t rely on it as a safeword against exaggeration. 🤷


  • I don’t remember the last time someone used the word “literally” and I couldn’t tell whether they meant it in the classic sense or in the modern sense, either as an intensifier or as filler. If you do, then I’d genuinely like to learn about that, because I don’t think I could imagine such a scenario. I might lack imagination or I might not be around people who use the word often enough to judge.

    I genuinely believe you overstate the matter, especially in claiming that the word had been robbed of its previous meaning. I still use the word exclusively with its classic meaning and I never see confused faces when I do. 🤷 (That’s not any kind of proof, but merely a reason for my current position on this.)














  • Best Practices thinking considered harmful. 🤷

    I like test names that are full sentences. Doing this for its own sake is unnecessary. It’s probably wise to practise this for a year, then decide when you still need it.

    For me, quite often, a combination of the test group name (often naming a behavior) and test function name (often naming a special case of that behavior) suffices, even though it is not a full sentence. (Example: test class SellOneItem, test method productNotFound. Is this not clear enough?)

    Test function names that merely repeatedly duplicate details (“conversion should…” to start 12 test names) indicate a test group trying to emerge (“Conversion Tests”). Insisting on full sentences for its own sake often either masks this risk (and delays helpful refactoring) or represents redundancy (merely reiterating what has been helpfully refactored).

    I have found this attention to full sentence names most helpful for tests whose audience is not programmers, since those folks are not accustomed to common source code conventions and patterns. For Programmer Tests, I think “should” turns this helpful advice into a risky overstatement.