[hinkley]

mocha and jasmine (in the node/javascript space) support nested setup and teardown methods and it's been really challenging for me to go back to using other frameworks, languages.

Not only does the nesting help limit the amount of setup and teardown you do, but when broad-reaching functional changes hit you in version 2, 3, it's so much easier to reorganize your tests to get the pre- and post-conditions right when they are already grouped that way.

The sad thing is that it takes a few release cycles before you feel any difference at all, and a couple more before you're absolutely sure that there are qualitative differences between the conventions. So it seems like a pretty arbitrary selection process instead of an obvious choice.

[twerquie]

I'm not sure if you're talking about the pain of going back to testing ruby / rails after using mocha / node, but I feel that specific pain, especially on projects with old-school Rails purists who insist on Test::Unit style. Switching to rspec gives you nested describe blocks with shared setup and teardown steps, as nice as mocha. Minitest has this BDD style built in too, but somehow the way Rails ties it in makes it difficult or impossible to take advantage of.