[prog] Programming for QA folks

[Jacinta Richardson]

Akkana Peck wrote:
> Jacinta Richardson writes:
>> Miriam English wrote:
>>> Perl can be extremely difficult to read later. This becomes very 

> The question is whether it's as easy for a team of first-time
> programmers, teaching each other on the job, to write clean
> maintainable code in Perl as it would be in Python? My hunch
> is that the Python code would come out cleaner.

I agree with you and Miriam that Python is an excellent first-time (or even 
nth-time) language for people to learn.  And as I said in my first reply, I 
don't feel that Perl is an ideal first language, although I don't think it's a 
terrible one either.  In fact, sometimes I'd prefer to have more first-time 
learners in our introductory Perl classes over the numbers of those who've 
programmed before and learned bad habits from elsewhere.  My reply to Miriam was 
just me disagreeing that Perl is necessarily unreadable.  I hear a lot of people 
parrot opinions about Perl's messiness without having any recent experience with 
it or its community.

I understood Anna's original email to be about testing and deciding between Korn 
Shell and Perl.  I think it's great to mention other language options as well, 
but I imagine it might be more helpful to also mention those language's testing 
frameworks.  I'd do this for you, but I don't know anything about Python's 
testing frameworks.  I know that there are TAP compatible tools for:
	C/C++,
	Javascript,
	PHP
but I don't know about what Python uses for testing.  This is obviously a flaw, 
and I'd love to hear about the external process testing tools Python makes 
available.

For more information about TAP and testing in Perl (beyond what I posted in my 
first email) I recommend:

	* http://perl.net.au/wiki/Testing  (basic overview)
	* http://qa.perl.org/ ( Perl's Quality Assurance Projects - lots of examples 
and links to articles )
	* http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Test::Tutorial (testing tutorial)

All the best,

	Jacinta