On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 11:31 PM, Casey Ransberger <casey.obrie...@gmail.com > wrote:
> Thanks for your reply! Some comments below. > > > On Oct 14, 2010, at 7:50 PM, John Zabroski <johnzabro...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Casey, > > Let's cut this email you wrote into two ideas. > > it makes me wish I had some time to study prolog. >> > > Why don't you have time to study prolog? What does the word "study" even > mean here? > > > Ah; sorry. I should back up. Assertions in tests when viewed from a > particular perspective look a lot like rules/questions in Prolog. I have a > hunch that Prolog has some secret alien technology that testers in the large > are mostly unaware of, but I could be wrong. > > I need to understand Prolog to be certain. I sit presently with a nice > porter and a book called "Programming in Prolog" which I found for a couple > of dollars at a second hand book store a few blocks from here. > > As far as time is concerned, that's quite simply: slapping some lipstick on > the pig and running it out the door "in the large" winds up being ridiculous > working hours sometimes. > > If it is any boost to you, Richard O'Keefe writes in the works cited / recommended reading section of The Craft of Prolog: Bill Clocksin and Chris Mellish taught Prolog at Edinburgh while David > Warren, Lawrence Byrd, and Fernando Pereira (the "DEC-10 Prolog team at > Edinburgh") were still there. Chris Mellish wrote PDP-11 Prolog and played > a major part in the development of Poplog. Bill Clocksin wrote the Prolog-X > system (Lawrence Byrd was involved in that too). Unlike the authors of many > Prolog books, these two people do actually understand the language. Despite > many Prolog books that have come out since the first edition of this one, it > is still my choice for a *first* Prolog textbook. Follow it up with > Sterling & Shapiro or Peter Ross's book. > O'Keefe's book is basically the gold standard of Prolog recommended reading, at least that I am familiar with. Moving on... > > > I wonder: what if all we did was write the tests? What if we threw some >> kind of genetic algorithm or neural network at the task of making the tests >> pass? >> >> > You should read Robert Binder's book on testing. > > > Oh! I will make an effort to hunt it down. There are lots of books on > testing, but very few really good ones; thanks for the recommendation! > > Yeah, there's not much in terms of really good general testing books. Even many unit testing books don't really teach how to test well. There are about 3 good books on unit testing worth considering buying, and most great programmers don't need to read them, but they can turn average programmers to good or even great programmers.
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