From: Gennady <gfb@...>
Date: 2004-06-10T04:01:53+09:00
Subject: Re: Unit tests ... not just for the young

Scott Rubin wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I'm current a college student in the US who almost has a BS in computer
> science.  At the school I go to we have a co-op program. What this means
> is that before you graduate you must work in the industry for your
> degree for a total of 40 weeks.  Currently I am working on co-op at a
> small firm writing some software in ruby for an embedded linux machine.
> 
>  From what I have seen of other students in my major I can tell you,
> many of them are just as useless as you say.  I have friends, who are
> good people, but they have no passion for making software. For whatever
> reason they became CS majors and they get passing grades. They learn
> everything that is taught to them in class, but that is the only
> experience they have.  The school does not require prior programming
> experience to get in the program.  So what you get coming out of college
> are 75% of the degrees signifying a complete mastery of java and a basic
> understanding of low level programming theory.  The other 25% of the
> students are like me who actually care about software. We do software in
> our spare time and not just for class. We learn things not taught in the
> classroom. Most of us do Linux and other OSS stuff.  I can safely say
> that every day I see another one of those 75% of students fail to get
> hired or getting replaced by outsourcing. At the same time I see us in
> the other 25% getting jobs and moving on with life. The resumes from the
> 75% are all the same, because they all took the same classes and learned
> teh same stuff. The resumes of the rest are varied and specialized
> depending on their interests. Some like language theory, some like
> embedded stuff, some like large database stuff. There are good
> programmers coming out of college, just most of them suck because they
> aren't coders at heart. It just happened to be the major they picked.
> 
> Concerning unit testing I can say this.  While I can understand all the
> reasons to not do unit testing, and there are many, it is sometimes
> useful.  Primarily I usually perform unit tests in heavily object
> oriented programs and not in others.  If I am writing an object oriented
> programming it takes me all of a few minutes to write a main that
> creates multiple instances of a class and calls all of the member
> functions with a variety of inputs.  Just doing this simple thing lets
> me know right away if a class is working properly or not.  Many times I
> have had projects work on the first "real" try because I unit tested all
> the components first.  However, when doing less object oriented
> programming it is often more difficult to do unit tests for the reasons
> above having to do with blocking out code and such.  What is important
> is that you do test your code and that you do it in the most efficient
> way for you.
> 
> I thought this was an interesting thread and just had to say my piece :)
> 
> -Scott
> 
> 
> 

Very good story, thanks. What do you feel about being a programmer (like 
in "software developer", not "coder") for the rest of your life, by the 
way? ;-)

Gennady.