Thread by @GeePawHill

Avoiding fakes, I'mo telegraph this, cuz so many have asked, but the truth is February is my personal ebb-tide, and as much as I wish I could lay it out at the primer level, I simply don't have that in me right now.

Start by knowing who's awkward and who's not, and why. Identify which collaborators are awkward. You can read about awkwardness here:

geepawhill.org/2021/02/12/awk…

Now go look at your function that needs a fake of that awkward collaborator. It needs that fake because the awkward call is surrounded by logic you need to test.

Most of those functions, the overwhelming majority of them, will be shaped like this

//... some lines of prolog code
awkward.call(...)
// ... some lines of epilog code

What do I mean, prolog? Well, it's the kind of code that figures out whether we should be calling the awkward, or it's the kind of code that takes some input and cooks it a little to create the arguments for that awkward call.

What do I mean by epilog? It's the kind of code that takes the result of that awkward call and cooks and massages it, or makes decisions based on its return.

That shape: prolog - awkward - epilog, that shape is why you need to have a fake to test that function.

But, one naturally asks, what the hell am I on about, it's not like you don't need the prolog and the epilog. I can't just not prepare before the call or not cook after the call. Bah, humbug, you cry!

The fix is simple. Change that code to read:

function() {
a = prolog()
b = awkward.call(a)
return epilog(b)
}

Or if you're comfy with compaction:

function() {
return epilog(https://t.co/G04Y7dzZo7(prolog()))
}

Bam. Test every case of prolog(). Test every case of epilog(). Test every case of awkward.call().

*Don't* test function().

How often does this scam work? VERY VERY OFTEN. It does not always work. Some loops develop their results incrementally, so my one call to awkward depends on my previous call to awkward. There is no way to test that w/o a fake.

But in nearly every other case, you can gain complete satisfaction without a single fake being in play.

There are a couple of special cases of all this, and some pretty damned slick technique that can handle the cases not covered by this trick. That's for another day.

Listen: You are a beautiful and intelligent creature, and you can do this.

But you gotta want to.

Learn "composed method".
Learn "strategy".
Learn "replace supplier with supplies".

This will still leave you with that tiny number of cases where you gotta roll a fake.

Roll it by hand, don't use an auto-mocker.

It will make you faster and stronger and, yes, happier.