Are Tests Necessary in TypeScript?

Re:Are Tests Necessary in TypeScript? by simiones on Tuesday April 14, 2020 @10:43AM (#22866578)

Not really. You still need tests to check whether your application is actually achieving its targets in real-world usage, including feature completeness, usability, performance; and how all of these are impacted by the environment (e.g. network issues in a distributed application).

Formal verification only tells you that the application matches its spec, given a set of assumptions. Only testing can tell you whether the spec matches the business case, and whether the spec assumptions hold.

Paraphrasing Knuth, code that has only been proven correct but not actually tested should always be approached with caution.

Edit: Knuth, not Dijkstra

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Re:Are Tests Necessary in TypeScript? by seanmcdirmid on Tuesday April 14, 2020 @10:57AM (#22866793)

Theoretically, formal verification can only tell you as much as can be encoded in a formal [email protected] problem is that no such kind of specs are known to exist (yet, if ever). As a thought experiment, if the informal specs written in English/Chinese or trapped in our head were as incomplete as a formal spec, we wouldn’t even be able to reason about what to test in the first place.

@ Then there is the limitation of verification tech of course.

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