minitest-english

MiniTest is an awesome testing framework. It's small, fast, and has very little magic.

There are two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. — Phil Karlton

Unfortunately, MiniTest fails at the latter.

minitest-english provides a simple interface for defining aliases in MiniTest assertions, expectations, and other modules/classes. It also optionally augments MiniTest's default assertion and expectation naming with semantically symmetric aliases.

MiniTest provides a variety of positive and negative assertions:

assert_equals true, true
refute_equals true, false
assert_nil nil
refute_nil true
# etc.

"Refute" is not an antonym of "assert." Refutation requires proof, not just assertion.

Every assertion has an aliased expectation:

true.must_equal true
true.wont_equal false
nil.must_be_nil
true.wont_be_nil
# etc.

"Must" is present tense but "wont" (contraction of "will not") is future tense.

minitest-english provides an interface for watching and aliasing methods in MiniTest::Assertions, MiniTest::Expectations, and other modules. Once a module/class and aliasing rule is registered with MiniTest::English, all current and future methods in the module/class that match the rule will be aliased according to that rule.

minitest-english also optionally aliases all refute assertions with deny assertions and all wont expectations with must_not expectations.

It's simple and does not use method_missing or any other inefficient techniques.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'minitest-english'

And then execute:

$ bundle install

Require it in your test_helper or spec_helper:

require 'minitest/english'

To alias all refute* assertions to deny* assertions:

require 'minitest/english/deny'

To alias all wont* expectations to must_not* expectations:

require 'minitest/english/must_not'

The basic format is:

MiniTest::English.register_assertion/expectation, matcher_string, replacement_string

Let's register an expectation:

MiniTest::English.register_expectation "wont*", "must_not*"

That will alias all expectations that begin with wont to ones that begin with must_not. register_assertion works the same way.

MiniTest::English's register_assertion and register_expectation methods are just sugar that transform their input and send it to MinTest::English.register.

MiniTest::English.register takes a module/class, a regex that matches undesirable methods and captures the desirable parts of those methods, and a block that receives the captures and returns a symbol/string of the new method name. These two methods produce the same result:

MiniTest::English.register_expectation "wont*", "must_not*"

MiniTest::English.register MiniTest::Expectations, /\Awont(.*)\z/ do |captures|
  :"must_not#{captures[0]}"
end

MiniTest::English.register is provided as a more flexible but verbose interface to deal with other classes/modules and other edge cases.

Write your negative assertions with deny.

require 'minitest/english/deny'
refute_equal "English", "Do you speak it?"
# refute* becomes deny*
deny_equal "English", "Do you speak it?"

Write your negative expectations with must_not.

require 'minitest/english/must_not
"Do you speak it?".wont_equal "English"
# wont* becomes must_not*
"Do you speak it?".must_not_equal "English"

Perhaps you prefer geometric equality to semantic equality.

"assert".length == "refute".length
"must".length == "wont".length

If so, use minitest-english anyway and make your middle school English teacher proud.

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request