This is a meta-post around a series – the posts themselves will be linked to below as they’re available.
A programmer moving between Perl, Python, and Ruby is unlikely to run in to too many conceptual challenges. There’s new syntax to learn, and there are a few wrinkles: someone new to Perl will have to get used to adding strange characters to the beginning of their variable names, someone new to Python is going to wrap their head around the scoping rules, and someone new to Ruby will probably spend some time trying to understand monkey-patching and Eigen-classes, but the similarities vastly outweigh the differences.
One interesting variation between the three is their approach to automated testing. All three have mature and varied testing ecosystems, but all three solve a couple of fundamental problems differently.
We’re going to examine at:
• The anatomy of a simple testing assertion in each language
• How these simple assertions are extended
• Reporting to users or computers the status of the whole test suite
Links will appear as these get written…
