Ah, I didn’t get that impression myself, but looking at the article again I can see it.

The author clearly doesn’t realize that they still mock in their examples. I understand the annoyance with mocking away the complexity, however.

To address your second claim - doing IO in tests does not mean testing IO.

I test my file interactions by creating a set of temporary directories and files, invoking my code, and checking for outcomes. That way I can write my expectation before my implementation. This doesn’t test IO, merely utilizes it. The structure in temp that I create is still a mock of an expected work target.

Very similarly I recently used a web server running in another thread to define expectations of API client’s behavior when dealing with a very ban-happy API. That web server is a mock that allowed me to clearly define expectations of rate limiting, ssl enforcement (it is a responsibility of an API client to initialize network client correctly), concurrency control during OAuth refreshes etc., without mocking away complexities of a network. Even better, due to mocking like that I was able to tinker with my network library choice without changing a single test.

Mocks in the general sense that author defined them are inevitable if we write software in good faith - they express our understanding and expectation of a contract. Good mocks make as few claims as possible, however. A networking mock should sit in the network, for example, lest it makes implied claims about the network transport itself.

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t this allow one to represent virtually any resource as a mail inbox/outbox with access through a generic mail app?

I’m working with a specialized healthcare company right now, and this looks like a way to represent patient treatments data as an intuitive timeline of messages. With a local offline cache in case of outages. Security of local workstations is a weak point of course, but when is it not…

I sit at home and when visiting someone as a guest. No mess, no cover positioning arguments, everyone’s happy for a meager cost of me potentially forgetting that this was supposed to be a quick in’n’out and writing this comment instead of rejoining the boring dystopia outside.

Sorry, but you don’t get to claim groupthink while ignoring state of Apache when Nginx got released.

Apache was a mess of modules with confusing documentation, an arsenal of foot guns, and generally a PITA to deal with. Nginx was simpler, more performant, and didn’t have the extra complexity that Apache was failing to manage.

My personal first encounter was about hosting PHP applications in a multiuser environment, and god damn was nginx a better tool.

Apache caught up in a few years, but by then people were already solving different problems. Would nginx arrive merely a year later, it would get lost to history, but it arrived exactly when everyone was fed up with Apache just the right amount.

Nowadays, when people choose a web server, they choose one they are comfortable with. With both httpds being mature, that’s the strongest objective factor to influence the choice. It’s not groupthink, it’s a consequence of concrete events.

Thorium reactors have a cleverly dumb failsafe. If reactor control fails, there’s a plug that melts and drains the contents into a container that’s not fit for runoff neutron generation.

That’s an example of a failsafe that fits its purpose. It’s still possible to fuck it up, but it would take a lot of effort to do so.

And if there’s a bug in that code, you’re fucked.

Safety features should work if everything else fails. Their failure mode can’t be “fuck it, it didn’t work”. Which is directly opposite to the failure mode of a subscription based service.

The don’t and they do.

Some myths are just clingier than a tick embedded in a hair follicle.

di(

Turns out, I do need therapy.

By becoming a CTO and having an early retirement. Or not at all.

It’s your job to prove your assertion that we know enough about cognition to make reasonable comparisons.

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Either by making it segfault or you don’t.

I got a whole software developer career going out of my attempts to exit vim.

Did you mean OpenID perchance? OAuth is not an authentication protocol.