Re:Ask HN: What change in your programming technique has bee...
by sjamaan on Thursday January 23, 2020 @02:28PM
(#22130897)
I would say: Automated testing and a functional programming mindset.
Even for legacy projects, starting with adding regression tests for every bug you find is a great way to introduce testing. And when you add new features, you can write tests for that as well.
I find that a FP mindset is helpful mostly because it tends to reduce the amount of global or spread-around state. This in turn makes testing and quickly iterating in a REPL a lot easier. Also when later the time comes to debug, it's much simpler if you don't have a huge amount of state to set up first.
And even if a lot of state is required, having it be an explicit input to a procedure is helpful because it makes it much clearer what you need to set up when doing manual testing.
Even for legacy projects, starting with adding regression tests for every bug you find is a great way to introduce testing. And when you add new features, you can write tests for that as well.
I find that a FP mindset is helpful mostly because it tends to reduce the amount of global or spread-around state. This in turn makes testing and quickly iterating in a REPL a lot easier. Also when later the time comes to debug, it's much simpler if you don't have a huge amount of state to set up first.
And even if a lot of state is required, having it be an explicit input to a procedure is helpful because it makes it much clearer what you need to set up when doing manual testing.