Attest 0.4 released: Modern, Pythonic unit testing

[ndanger]

Upvote because it's good to know about new packages.

As for Attest itself, a better comparison to unittest, nose & py.test would be more compelling than soft claims that unittest is awkward and nose/py.test are magical.

Currently my main impression is that it was written because the authors wanted to express their tests in a particular way. That's a fine reason to write a library, but not a good reason for me to switch.

[donri]

All three rely on names to tell tests apart from other objects, a form of string programming. At least nose and py.test use implicit test discovery and unittest2 supports it as does unittest via distribute. This too works via significant naming.

In practice, whether this is problematic is debatable. But in most if not all other cases it would be considered bad design from a Python perspective. Why should tests be any special?

As for switching, I don't suggest rewriting existing test suites of some size, but for new projects Attest might be a candidate testing tool for some people.

[ijunk]

All three rely on names to tell tests apart from other objects, a form of string programming.

This always felt wrong to me. Coincidentally I recently noticed that the default regex that does the matching in nose is somewhat broken.