Most lay people and programmers early in their career begin with the assumption that we write code to communicate to the computer what we'd like it to do, and how. While this is partly true, it misses a much more important audience; people. And for much greater reason than humans must be able to maintain … Continue reading Communicating with Whom?
Difficulties With Test Metrics
The answer to the question of whether we should write automated test suites has largely been settled. We absolutely should write unit tests, and possibly even integration and end-to-end tests. But as acceptance of this practice grew, and adoption became more widespread, a follow-up question arose; How many tests should we write? How do we … Continue reading Difficulties With Test Metrics
A Model For Parallel Testing In Fortran
The other day, a friend of mine and I were working together to add some tests to a library of utilities he wanted to put together. He was keen to get some experience with my testing framework, so we decided to do some work on it together. He does a lot of parallel programming, and … Continue reading A Model For Parallel Testing In Fortran
With A Little Help From My Friends
I spent last week at my first Fortran Standards Committee meeting. It was a pretty interesting experience. Everyone there was brilliant, and interested in trying to do a good job improving the language. And yet, it was still somehow very disfunctional. The committee is comprised mainly of representatives from compiler vendors/writers, with a few representatives … Continue reading With A Little Help From My Friends
Stick to Your Principles
I've been using Fortran for a long time, but I've only recently started interacting with people trying make changes to the language. It's been a bit of an eye opening experience. I had intuitions about what it would be like and how things happen in language design, but now I've got first hand experience, and … Continue reading Stick to Your Principles
Kicking And Screaming
How valuable is code that runs fast, but can't be extended or modified? How can you be productive in a code base that's grown into a big ball of mud because that was how you made things fast? How much speed would you be willing to give up in the name of developer happiness and … Continue reading Kicking And Screaming
Like Miracle Grow For Your Garden
In the last post I did about the Vegetables testing framework I developed, I talked about how much of a success it had been. Now I've cranked it up to 11. I've now got what is effectively QuickCheck level functionality implemented in a Fortran testing framework. For anyone not familiar with QuickCheck, it is effectively … Continue reading Like Miracle Grow For Your Garden
New Toys
This effectively a direct copy of my last Arch Install post, but with modifications for my new laptop. It's a System76 Darter Pro, and so it a has a few differences from the Lenovo Yoga 13 I had before. The following are the steps I took in order to get Arch installed and running with … Continue reading New Toys
The Power of a Testing Framework
I am now ready to call Vegetables a huge success. In my last post I discussed its design and construction. I am now using it in a project at work. The power and convenience it has brought us is huge. The design of Vegetables is such that its use highly encourages writing your tests in a … Continue reading The Power of a Testing Framework
Eat Your Vegetables
About a year ago, I was starting a new project at work using Fortran. For anybody who didn't know, the tools and libraries available to Fortran programmers are few and far between, and not particularly extensible or adaptable. But, being the testing and automation proponent I am, I went looking for a testing framework. The … Continue reading Eat Your Vegetables
