> Often I have seen people put a lot of effort into testing things that really doesn't have much payback compared to what they could be testing instead.
90% of the "unit tests" that I've observed in the wild are checking for things that a modern type system would easily prevent you from doing.
The "unit testing is a magic bullet" cults seem form in environments that use weakly typed or highly dynamic languages like Javascript that let you pass anything to anything and only blow up when you execute one particular branch at runtime.
A good reason to use Typescript, Rust, Python's optional type hints, etc. is that they point out these problems for you as you're writing your code, so you don't have to unravel your mess three days later as you're cranking out 10 pages of boilerplate unit tests that only cover two functions and aren't even close to being exhaustive.
Use better languages, stop wasting your time testing for typos and brain farts, and focus on testing higher-level aspects of your design that your language and tools can't possibly know about.
90% of the "unit tests" that I've observed in the wild are checking for things that a modern type system would easily prevent you from doing.
The "unit testing is a magic bullet" cults seem form in environments that use weakly typed or highly dynamic languages like Javascript that let you pass anything to anything and only blow up when you execute one particular branch at runtime.
A good reason to use Typescript, Rust, Python's optional type hints, etc. is that they point out these problems for you as you're writing your code, so you don't have to unravel your mess three days later as you're cranking out 10 pages of boilerplate unit tests that only cover two functions and aren't even close to being exhaustive.
Use better languages, stop wasting your time testing for typos and brain farts, and focus on testing higher-level aspects of your design that your language and tools can't possibly know about.