Testable JavaScript

Chapter 1. Testable JavaScript

Your ideas are unique; your code is not. Almost every industry has been completely revolutionized by machines; yet strangely, the computer science industry has not. Programmers are essentially doing the exact same things we have been doing for 40 years or so. We write code by hand, and that code gets compiled or interpreted and then executed. We look at the output and determine whether we need to go around again. This cycle of development has remained unchanged since the dawn of computer science. Our machines are orders of magnitude faster, RAM and secondary storage sizes are unimaginably large, and software has grown increasingly complex to take advantage of these developments. Yet we still write code by hand, one keystroke at a time. We still litter our code with “print” statements to figure out what is going on while it runs. Our development tools have indeed grown increasingly powerful, but with every hot new language, tooling starts all over again. The bottom line is that writing software remains an almost entirely manual process in a world of incredible automation, and most of that automation is due to the fruits of our software-writing labors. The very act of writing software one character at a time is the height of hypocrisy.

While the bulk of any code you write has been written before, either in the language you are currently using or in another one, every application is unique, even if yours is doing exactly the same thing as your competitor’s. ...