[theptip]

I tend to think that tests should be carefully crafted for readability just like normal code. The “content of a REPL” is unlikely to be well-thought out enough to preserve meaningful invariants while remaining supple in the direction of likely changes. Perhaps in the hands of very good engineers this tool is net positive, but I shudder at giving junior engineers a tool that encourages less structure in tests.

A good set of fixture/helper functions should let you write really short and expressive tests (or tabular parametrized tests, if you prefer) which seems to me to resolve most of the pain points the author is complaining about.

One big advantage I do see with this approach is it seems to be a very compact rendering of a table of outputs; in Python+pytest+PyCharm if I run a 10-example parametrized test, I have to click through to see each failure individually. Perhaps there is a UX learning here that just rendering the raw errors into the code beside the test matrix could help visualize results faster.

As an aside, I have recently been enjoying the “write an ascii representation as your test assert” mode of testing, it can give a different way of intuiting what is going on.