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From: Jacob Champion <jacob.champion@enterprisedb.com>
Date: Wed, 12 Jun 2024 12:31:23 -0700
Message-ID: <CAOYmi+mA7-uNqpY-0jNZY=fE-QsbfeM1j5Mc-vu1Xm+=B8NOXA@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: RFC: adding pytest as a supported test framework
To: Jelte Fennema-Nio <postgres@jeltef.nl>
Cc: Noah Misch <noah@leadboat.com>, Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>, 
	Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net>, PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
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On Wed, Jun 12, 2024 at 4:40=E2=80=AFAM Jelte Fennema-Nio <postgres@jeltef.=
nl> wrote:
> I think C#, Java, Go, Rust, Kotlin, and Swift would be acceptable
> choices for me (and possibly some more). They allow some type of
> introspection, they have a garbage collector, and their general
> tooling is quite good.
>
> But I think a dynamically typed scripting language is much more
> fitting for writing tests like this. I love static typing for
> production code, but imho it really doesn't have much benefit for
> tests.

+1. I write mostly protocol mocks and glue code in my authn testing,
to try to set up the system into some initial state and then break it.
Of the languages mentioned here, I've only used C#, Java, and Go. If I
had to reimplement my tests, I'd probably reach for Go out of all of
those, but the glue would still be more painful than it probably needs
to be.

> As scripting languages go, the ones that are still fairly heavily in
> use are Javascript, Python, Ruby, and PHP. I think all of those could
> probably work, but my personal order of preference would be Python,
> Ruby, Javascript, PHP.

- Python is the easiest language I've personally used to glue things
together, bar none.
- I like Ruby as a language but have no experience using it for
testing. (RSpec did come up during the unconference session and
subsequent hallway conversations.)
- Javascript is a completely different mental model from what we're
used to, IMO. I think we're likely to spend a lot of time fighting the
engine unless everyone is very clear on how it works.
- I don't see a use case for PHP here.

> TO CLARIFY: This thread is not a proposal to replace Perl with Python.
> It's a proposal to allow people to also write tests in Python.

+1. It doesn't need to replace anything. It just needs to help us do
more things than we're currently doing.

--Jacob