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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Best Practices thinking considered harmful. 🤷

    I like test names that are full sentences. Doing this for its own sake is unnecessary. It’s probably wise to practise this for a year, then decide when you still need it.

    For me, quite often, a combination of the test group name (often naming a behavior) and test function name (often naming a special case of that behavior) suffices, even though it is not a full sentence. (Example: test class SellOneItem, test method productNotFound. Is this not clear enough?)

    Test function names that merely repeatedly duplicate details (“conversion should…” to start 12 test names) indicate a test group trying to emerge (“Conversion Tests”). Insisting on full sentences for its own sake often either masks this risk (and delays helpful refactoring) or represents redundancy (merely reiterating what has been helpfully refactored).

    I have found this attention to full sentence names most helpful for tests whose audience is not programmers, since those folks are not accustomed to common source code conventions and patterns. For Programmer Tests, I think “should” turns this helpful advice into a risky overstatement.






  • “summation” is also related to summary. All these words are related to reducing a collection of things to a single thing. A sum reduces a collection of numbers to its total. A summary reduces a collection of thoughts to its essence. A summation is effectively a synonym for a summary.

    The word multiplication describes the operation applied to each pair of numbers. The word production would refer to the act of multiplying an arbitrary collection of numbers. Just as it would be for addition and summation.

    It would fit the pattern.





  • I would want to repeat that study with novels written in the past 25 years before concluding too much. Yes, the participants had access to a dictionary, but I imagine that needing to decipher certain parts, such as foreign cultural references and familiar words with unexpected meanings, interferes with the brain’s usual functions for turning words into images in the mind’s eye. And this even ignores the folks with aphantasia like me.



  • Political discussions online rarely lead to satisfying resolutions. As a result, political discussions bleed into everyday discussion in the desperate hope that something, somewhere, will magically make sense.

    Similarly, when businesses have meetings that don’t actually resolve matters, every meeting becomes a desperate chance to discuss things that matter in the hopes they’ll be resolved, so then every meeting that needs to happen will happen during every scheduled meeting, even wrhb ostensibly unrelated. This continues until meeting culture changes and even overall communication culture changes.

    It seems natural and reasonable in such an environment for many people (like you) to want to disengage. Why continue doing something that never seems to lead to resolution?



  • jbrains@sh.itjust.workstocats@lemmy.worldShe lay
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    2 months ago

    I am quite familiar with the verbs. Thanks.

    My original joke was based on the assumption that “She lay” was intended to be in the present tense (and why wouldn’t it be?) and therefore a humorous use of colloquial English (in place of “she lays”, possibly invoking African American English for humorous effect. We can argue about whether this is culturally sensitive.). The corresponding correction would therefore be “She lie”, rather than the grammatically standard “She lies”.




  • jbrains@sh.itjust.workstocats@lemmy.worldShe lay
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    2 months ago

    Yes. It didn’t sound past tense in my head, but that certainly fits.

    And no: “she lie” would be a colloquial present tense assuming that “she lay” was a similar colloquial conjugation of the verb “to lay” as commonly used in place of “to lie”.