_pius

Journal clubs are vicious. Everybody's got their brains and knives out …

actually, having read what you wrote, saying that “journal clubs are vicious … everybody’s got their … knives out” undermines your argument by implying that even good papers will be “roundly critiqued” in that setting, making this about as weak a point as anybody can make.

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on further reflection, what I do find to be a strong point but in favor of Loeb’s argument is the fact that it triggered the scientists who wrote this comment and its grandparent to underscore the point of the article by more or less heaping scorn on the author, listing their own credentials, and proceeding to make — forgive me — non sequitur arguments from authority instead of substantively refuting the claims.

if this is what happens to a former department chair at Harvard when they question orthodoxy, it indeed does not augur well for less-credentialed researchers, regardless of the merit of their work.

Not sure why you’re injecting inflammatory bile into an otherwise civil thread. If you read past the first sentence, you’ll refute your own point. Think before trolling.

https://www.cjr.org/analysis/capital-b-black-styleguide.php

From the article:

To capitalize Black, in her view, is to acknowledge that slavery “deliberately stripped” people forcibly shipped overseas “of all other ethnic/national ties.” She added, “African American is not wrong, and some prefer it, but if we are going to capitalize Asian and South Asian and Indigenous, for example, groups that include myriad ethnic identities united by shared race and geography and, to some degree, culture, then we also have to capitalize Black.”

The facile sophistry of comments like yours is becoming obnoxious. An actual fascist mob already came for us last week and we were not protected, get it?

There can be interesting intellectual arguments about whether this was the right move but breathlessly calling ToS enforcement by private companies a “mob” while ignoring an actual mob with lead pipes, guns, and bombs ain’t it.

I have. The assumptions you make in your code are there whether you test them or not. Better to make them explicit. This is why TDD can be useful as a design tool. Bad designs are incredibly annoying to test. :)

For example if you have to mock 3 other things every time you test a unit, it may be a good sign that you should reconsider your design not delete all your tests.

For the edification of junior programmers who may end up reading this thread, I’m just going to come right out and say it: this is awful advice in general.

For situations where this appears to be good advice, it’s almost certainly indicative of poor testing infrastructure or poorly written tests. For instance, consider the following context from the parent comment:

Otherwise you're implicitly testing the implementation, which makes refactoring impossible.

A big smell here is if the large majority of your tests are mocked. This might mean you're testing at too fine-grained a level.

These two points are in conflict and help clarify why someone might just give up and delete their tests.

The argument for deleting tests appears to be that changing a unit’s implementation will cause you to have to rewrite a bunch of old unrelated tests anyway, making refactoring “impossible.” But indeed that’s (almost) the whole point of mocking! Mocking is one tool used for writing tests that do not vary with unrelated implementations and thus pose no problem when it comes time to refactor.

Now there is a kernel of truth about an inordinate amount of mocking being a code smell, but it’s not about unit tests that are too fine-grained but rather unit tests that aren’t fine-grained enough (trying to test across units) or just a badly designed API. I usually find that if testing my code is annoying, I should revisit how I’ve designed it.

Testing is a surprisingly subtle topic and it takes some time to develop good taste and intuition about how much mocking/stubbing is natural and how much is actually a code smell.

In conclusion, as je42 said below:

Make sure you tests run (very) fast and are stable. Then there is little cost to pay to keep them around.

The key, of course, is learning how to do that. :)

This subtly dehumanizing idea that certain races are normal while others are irregular is the root of many problems.