Clojurians Log v2
off-topic
Hypothesis: If all we all collectively agreed to rename “unit tests” to “code example”, that would significantly increase the chance of them being written in the first place.
(I say this is as someone who never found much enthusiasm for “unit testing”)
Nice Hypothesis. I hardly write any test with Clojure. Also because I don't use it for work or for a library. I really like with Rust you can add code examples in the documentation, right above the code. I guess with macros with Clojure something similar could be done. Like defne define a function, with an example of using the function.
Same. I’ve written generative tests for things that really needed to be correct and the cost of messing up is high. Those can help, like a lot. But unit tests… I barely can see the value.
I like the idea of specifying them next to the original function. There’s an overhead of switching to a separate namespace to write the “examples”.
Python does this: https://docs.python.org/3/library/doctest.html However, for tests that require non-trivial setup it can easily become awkward. EUnit (from Erlang) has a feature where you can write unit tests at the bottom of a module. It’s pretty nice for co-locating the tests and the code, and helps emphasise the “unit” part of unit testing. This also lets you test “private” functions which can be both a blessing and a curse. The risk, of course, is that a module’s “internal” API is much more volatile
@gklijs Do you use Rust professionally?
Not really, I do have a library other people use in production. Recently I made a poc, but mostly because of politics I don't see that going to production soon.
I think you can use the :test metadata for this, e.g. with https://clojuredocs.org/clojure.test/with-test
I think a problem with the name "unit tests" is the concept of an "unit". Is it just a function? Will it use internal data? And so on... I do write LOTS of tests, but very few would be considered "unit tests".
A “unit” in a language that has immutable constructs and for the most part relies on pure functions is not the same as a “unit” in a language that does PLOP.
Having said that, there are times when you would possibly write tests that focus on smaller parts, not just the whole thing since it might be a little easier to focus and setup
Same here. I write lots and lots of test, for clj-kondo and babashka, but most of them test the entire chain, including the parsing of command line args, all the way to printing the output.
same here
Hi, how does Git versioning work? In specific: What is saved with each commit? Just a high quality diff compared with the previous instance? Or is it a canonical copy is saved with meta data describing previous instances as diffs from the canonical-current-instance?
To me it would appear that the latter, a current-canonical-version that applies a series of commits in reverse order (id est: undoes them) for getting to a previous commit is the most efficient solution for space and furthering work. Basically have the present moment as the main copy and everything else is a diff or series of diffs against that.
Each commit has the full project at that point in time. Space is saved using structural sharing.
So it appears seamless to the user as a full-project-at-each-moment but in reality the under-the-hood stores the stuff efficiently?
not just appears
I highly recommend https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2
Oh hey that's a lovely link, thank you I will check it out!
Yeah I recently interviewed for a job where one of the future projects for the thing was version control for user-generated documents... So I'm curious how one would implement it nicely.
There's a lot similarities with clojure's persistent data structures, where adding an element to a vector doesn't use twice the memory due to structural sharing
Right. I see what you mean. Yes I was admiring that about Clojure just yesterday.
I rather enjoy that those efficiency dilemmas are abstracted away from the general program
I can make a water park without being a plumber 😅
This might be a dumb question but what are peoples' workflow for using two computers to work on code? I have a desktop and just got a laptop and I want to be switching back and forth throughout the day. Just use dropbox or something?
So you reckon some form of structural sharing is key to efficiently storing git commits / git versions? Rebuilding from previous commits might be costly.
@jjttjj two physically distinct OS instances? (not just dual monitor?) I use github for code and you can fetch latest on the next machine each time. But uh, it depends on what you're working on. Code or image editing? Video editing would recommend getting an external HDD or SDD and putting huge files on it to swap quickly, or even swap-and-share a project directory on an external drive.
@sova it's not exactly meant for this use-case, but maybe you can take a look at https://mob.sh/ It's some bash tooling to enable making temporary git branches and WIP commits and push/pulling them between different computers. Primarily meant for quick handoffs between several people that are coding together, but I don't see why you couldn't use it to push/pull when switching computers :)
I'd be worried about using dropbox as my source-of-truth for git repos after seeing John Hughe's talk about quickchecking Dropbox (and also thinking back to all the Jepsen post-mortem posts). Distributed systems are hard when they want to auto-merge conflicts :)
^ to be fair, someone has pointed out to me in the past (can't recall who), that Dropbox had fixed those bugs found by Hughes when they released a new sync engine sometime ago.
I’ve been using Dropbox for years and years, all my oss repos are in there so I can work on them from anywhere although Github generally has all my code as well at the end of the day
My only gripe with Dropbox is that they still don’t have a thing like gitignore
Probably by design. Simplicity for most users
Storing full snapshots at each point in time is also important for integrity. From a design perspective it makes it harder for a bug to lose or munge data that's committed.
You may find the git internals chapter interesting, https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Internals-Plumbing-and-Porcelain
Hmm, that's a good point. Maybe storing a commit id and also storing some error correcting codes would help ensure things are A-OK.
Specifically the 10.2 and 10.4
https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Internals-Git-Objects https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Internals-Packfiles
Wow man thanks a lot, really appreciate the pin-pointedness
xD they even call the chapter Plumbing and Porcelain
Just code editing. Yeah I've taken a stab at just using github too but I've been burned by forgetting to commit or not yet having a coherent commit ready before switching computers
Finding good, real world projects that cover design isn't always easy, but the git book is a great example
random thought about programming languages. I found this article comparing Energy efficiency between programming languages (https://greenlab.di.uminho.pt/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/sleFinal.pdf?utm_source=thenewstack&utm_medium=website&utm_campaign=platform) and this got me thinking.. do we have any studies about expenses with cloud providers as your system grows by programming language? Something like to provide X workload using Python / Java / Go ... etc you will need an ECS cluster of size X1, X2, X3, and so on. (or EC2.. whatever) that will cost Y per month.
because of this GRPC benchmark https://github.com/LesnyRumcajs/grpc_bench/wiki/2021-04-13-bench-results I was thinking about that. It is easier to find python developers where I live and arguably easier for them to prototype something... but would be interesting to see how this choice also impact the budget of the company with servers to deploy these systems
Wonder how pricey to run up a vm in the cloud and use as your dev environment... then wherever you are you can work...
I work like this, switching between desktop on Linux and Windows laptop, git works fine for me. But I tend to check in frequently.
iirc correctly I think @borkdude might use dropbox?