News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ev... by mannykannot on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @07:01AM (#18449220)
You are right about that, but having code that passes a given test suite doesn't say anything about its secondary qualities, such as whether it can be understood. In theory, a failing test could improve your understanding of the situation, allowing you to refactor your initial pass at a solution, but I would bet that on this particular code base, the comprehension-raising doesn't go far enough, in most cases, for this to be feasible.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ev... by Huggernaut on Thursday November 15, 2018 @03:19AM (#18457707)
That seems orthogonal to testing though. Implementation code can be hard to understand with or without a test suite, at least with test, as you point out, you may be able to understand the behaviour at some higher abstraction.
[ Parent | on HN ]