[LRUG] Your Code is My Hell

[Glenn Gillen]

> I like the concept behind RDD, but what happens in practice is that
> the project evolves, and the code examples get out of sync with what
> actually runs, and you start thinking "this README duplicates my test
> examples, I need to DRY it out"

I guess the idea there is that changes should be applied to the README first?

The reason I've suddenly become more interested in this topic is that it's only very recently that I've had to start working with non-ruby developer to interface with the product I'm working on. And I'd been oblivious to just how often I simply read the source code or the test suite to understand how to use a library. It's a pretty shitty approach, and one that doesn't scale very well to larger frameworks, but it's almost exactly how I learnt Rails back in the day and it's been incremental learning since. It also seemed a very "ruby" specific experience. Javascript, Clojure, and Python devs to date simply wouldn't consider looking at the tests as a way of getting started with a tool.

> Or maybe the specs alone are not a suitable master document with which
> to introduce the system to a potential user, and there needs to be
> some other document which has a more narrative structure.  And then
> we're back to a README but this time it's a README with transclusions

Matt Wynne and Mortgage Driven Development has already been mentioned. Maybe it's no coincidence he's also been working on Relishapp to make the specs the README.