What you call integration testing, I call sloppy programming

Re: Your insistence on distinguishing unit testing and integration testing.

You make the distinction between unit testing and integration because you are a sloppy programmer. You throw side-effects around like a 5 year old in a play pen. You do not care for intellectual discipline in your thinking process. Nor do you care for high-level abstraction or composition of your software. Instead, you insist on this dogmatic “test driven” nonsense. You do this because you are married to the FORTRAN family of programming languages. Your so-called integration tests exist because you have implicit free variables in your equations like a ‘good little imperative programmer’. If you did decide to apply discipline and consider your side-effects, you’d see no distinction between unit testing and integration testing. I realise that this possibility escapes your feeble and narrowed mind at this stage of the socratic midwife process.

When you do unit test, you’re using an awfully impoverished method. I mean, “assert this and assert that”. Give me a break! You think this is going to “drive” something? Anything? OK, it drives me bonkers to think that you insist on spreading mythological, pseudo-scientific, fanatical bullshit (excuse the term, but it is most accurate) and have followers repeat said myths in such an obedient I-cant-think-for-myself fashion. You think you’re contributing to the “design” and “quality” of your software? How mistaken you are and what empathy I feel for you.

I implore you to retract your silliness and take seriously the charge that you are a sloppy programmer (evidence forthcoming). Your dependence on “agile this” (I play A grade squash, I’m perfectly agile, thanks) and “test drive that” are entirely dependent on an existing sloppy form of programming. Furthermore, these workarounds not only rest on a flawed premise, but they are extremely diluted anyway. Even with the given silly premise you can significantly improve! But I won’t tell you how, no not yet. First you must prepare for an act of apostasy, which I understand can be very traumatic. So I can’t help you until then, but in the meantime, I kindly ask that you stop imposing your silly ideas on me, because yes, they are silly.

See you on the other side.