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John Hughes - Testing the Hard Stuff and Staying Sane

ClojureTV · 39.2K views · 2014-03-26 · 47:17

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Overview

John Hughes, co-creator of QuickCheck, talks about property-based testing of hard systems. He shows production examples where it found very low-level bugs, including issues in the CAN bus standard.

On Hacker News

Recommended as the best introduction to property-based testing and cited for its examples of bugs found in the CAN standard.

Recommended by 4 HN people across 4 months · HN mentions 2016–2026

Topics

Testing, debugging & developer toolsFunctional programming
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quickcheckproperty-based testinggenerative testingcan busjohn hughes

What people said

Naomarik · 2016-12 · Strong recommendation

I'd recommend watching this [VIDEO] to see how powerful this can be. I've just discovered generative testing due to clojure.spec. Describing specs for your data works not only to help validate data structures but can be plugged in as properties for generative testing. After the "aha" moment it was followed by a feeling that I've wasted so much time writing specs just to validate data structures and writing specs just to see if my functions are working as they should. This is one of the things I wish was obvious in my learning track right after vim/emacs will help you code faster.

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devin · 2026-04 · Recommendation

One of the authors, John Hughes did a talk on property-based testing at Clojure West some number of years back. Worth a watch if you're interested: [VIDEO]

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robertfw · 2025-11 · Recommendation

I feel like this talk by John Hughes showed that there is real value in this approach with production systems of varying levels of complexity, with two different examples of using the approach to find very low level bugs that you'd never think to test for in traditional approaches. [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by ClojureTV, played through YouTube.

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