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.

Pulp Fiction

What?

minitest-english augments MiniTest's 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 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.

You know it's a tiny gem when you spend longer writing the readme than the code.

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'

Write your negative assertions with 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.

"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.