The REPL in .NET

time to read 2 min | 279 words

A post in Project Aardvark biog by Benjamin Pollack contains some very disturbing ideas:

Thirdly, you can’t easily write and test just a small amount of code. In most languages, your only option if you want to do this is to write a test suite for your class protocol, which takes a lot of time during development and probably isn’t necessary for a lot of smaller stuff.

Didn't you guys heard about Test Driven Development? You can get it in most languages now aday. In .Net, the common framework is NUnit (but I like MbUnit as well). In C++, you have CppUnitLite. The issues he is describing sounds like normal legacy code and can be solved using the techniques listed in Working Effectively With Legacy Code.

REPL is nice, but it is good for playing with the langauge; to see what will happen if you do XYZ, not to verify that XYZ indeed happens. I know that Joel's Test doesn't include Unit Testing, but still...

This is sad. Benjamin, get yourself a copy of the following books and read them, you'll likely learn a lot.

Product image for ASIN: 0735619484 Test-Driven Development in Microsoft .NET

Product image for ASIN: 0596007396 NUnit Pocket Reference