[2016] Mocking Framework Expectations

https://chrisoldwood.blogspot.com/2016/06/mocking-framework-expectations.html

More time wasted debugging an intermittently failing unit test caused by a mocking framework trying to be “helpful” instead of screaming that a dependency wasn’t explicitly configured 🤷‍♂️.

#StrictMocksByDefault

Just seen someone saying they support bans on trans healthcare for under 18s because “let kids be kids”.

By the time I hit puberty, I had KNOWN for a decade.

I also knew that telling anyone would be profoundly dangerous.

So I hid who I was and, am almost grateful that the neurodivergence gave the other kids something else to latch on to. They were so busy calling me a “mong” that they didn’t notice I was trans.

Because that might have got me murdered.

Or pushed me into a position where I felt I had no options other than the same end result.

So I hid it.

And I hid it really well.

And one of the things that happens when a 5 year old child is terrified of their parents, or their families, or the school bullies finding out who they really are is that they end up traumatised.

A 5 year old child. Traumatised and ashamed.

Ashamed because adults openly talked about them.

Or people like them.

And what they said was horrific. What they said made it very clear that they would regard their own kids as subhuman monsters if they ever found out.

So we hid. And an important part of ourselves died in childhood. A light that should have shone, went out.

I’ve tried my best to rekindle it.

I’ve managed somewhat but it will never be right. Not really. I’ve made peace with that.

“Let kids be kids”. Trans kids like me never got to be.

Because of people who say things like that.

There's a "Wayland set the Linux desktop back" blog going around now and ... it just makes me so tired.

That take is so amazingly wrong, but so persistent and popular. It is the "immigrants took mah job!" of takes for software. It is so flawed in so many different ways, and utterly ignores the host of actual reasons that Linux has stalled on the desktop.

It is apparently seductive, too, because it offloads the blame entirely on the crew developing Wayland without the person casting the blame considering for even a second the actual complexity of the problems. I could literally write a book on the reasons that the Linux desktop hasn't caught on; and I would, too, if I thought people would actually buy it and read it (a lot of people, I mean - enough to justify writing a book...)

But it boils down to this: Linux desktop development doesn't have more than a tiny, tiny fraction of the funding per year that Microsoft or Apple spend on marketing a single product line. Much less the kind of funds that go into R&D.

Vendors, mostly, are disinterested in supporting an OS that has less than 10% market share. At times they have even been actively dissuaded from doing so by certain other companies...

Users are, by and large, not willing to deal with inconvenience or having to learn new things in order to adopt the Linux desktop, even though the two main vendors are constantly making the user experience worse and continually taking away control of our own devices.

Wayland? It's a convenient scapegoat.

I'm not, by the way, arguing that Wayland is perfect, or that the community behind it has executed everything perfectly. And I'm certainly not arguing that people haven't had bad experiences with Wayland; that hasn't been _my_ experience, but I also have been using Linux for 30 years now -- and I choose hardware based on its Linux compatibility. I also have different expectations from a desktop than someone who has used Windows or macOS most of their life.

OK. Rant over. Be nicer to the Wayland folks. Stop blaming them for everything. In fact, let's maybe consider that what would really be useful is constructive takes on how we can succeed from here.