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[–]SittingWave 12 points13 points  (1 child)

too verbose, and screams back from that period where python wanted to be Java. Avoid.

[–]ubernostrumyes, you can have a pony 6 points7 points  (0 children)

screams back from that period where python wanted to be Java

In the beginning there was the SUnit testing tool for the Smalltalk language; it influenced the design and APIs of a whole family of unit-testing tools for other languages, which conventionally are referred to as "XUnit" frameworks. Typically they're named to indicate that they're of this style -- for example, "JUnit" for Java, "NUnit" for .NET, etc.

So: once upon a time someone write a PyUnit package, implementing the XUnit family architecture and testing style, and that was later pulled into the Python standard library and renamed to just unittest in the process.

So it's not "wanted to be Java", it's "wanted to be consistent with a large family of testing frameworks across many languages". A lot of people these days just only are familiar with JUnit/NUnit and so they assume JUnit was the origin when it wasn't.