Pre-conj Prep: Steve Miner

October 09, 2014

Talk: Generating Generators

Steve Miner's talk at the conj is about automatically creating test.check generators from a data-driven schema.

Background

Steve Miner is the author of the Herbert schema library. In Herbert, schemas are presented as plain EDN. They describe the structure and type of data. You can take a value and validate that it conforms to the schema. He is going to present a way to generate test.check generators from the schema. This way, you can do runtime checks and test-time checks. A good intro to Herbert is Steve Miner's lightning talk from Clojure/conj last year. Reid Draper gave a talk about test.check at Clojure/West.

Why it matters

test.check contains a set of combinators to create new generators from existing generators. But combinators are not very easy to read or write when the data they are generating is fairly complex. Being able to generate them automatically from a declarative, data-driven style is one way to make it easier.

Besides being easier, it also unifies the contracts (schema validation in function preconditions) with generative testing. The next domino would have to be building core.typed type signatures from the same data.

About Steve Miner

Github - Twitter

This post is one of a series called Pre-conj Prep, which originally was published by email. It's all about getting ready for the upcoming Clojure/conj, organized by Cognitect. Conferences are ongoing conversations and explorations. Speakers discuss trends, best practices, and the future by drawing on the rich context built up in past conferences and other media.

That rich context is what Pre-conj Prep is about. I want to enhance everyone's experience at the conj by surfacing that context. With just a little homework, we can be better prepared to understand and enjoy the talks and the hallway conversations, as well as the beautiful venue and city of Washington, DC.

Clojure/conj is a conference organized and hosted by Cognitect. This information is in no way official. It is not sponsored by nor affiliated with Clojure/conj or Cognitect. It is simply me curating and organizing public information about the conference.