A while back, I wrote a post moaning about RSpec.

My basic point was that there is something that feels wrong about it, and at the time, I couldn’t put my finger on it.

Now I have been using RSpec solidly for a week, on a new project, I think I have it. It’s the syntax.

Everytime I start writing expectations I put my spaces and underscores in the wrong place.

@person.name.should_not be_blank versus @person.name.should not_be blank. The latter is what my fingers think it should be.

I understand that be_XXX is a particular RSpec construct. And should or should_not marks an expectation.

But somewhere in there, the word breaks feel arbitrary and wrong.

In RSpec’s defence, however, there is one advantage that puts it way ahead of Test::Unit.

You see, because of the above, I find RSpec hard to write. I keep getting bits wrong and having to retype lines.

However, when looking back through some Test::Unit code I had written for another project, I came across RSpec’s real advantage. Test::Unit is easy to write but practically impossible to read. I had no idea what was going on, and if a seemingly trivial change caused a cascade of errors, it took ages to root out the problem.

But RSpec is easy to read.

it "should not have a blank name" do
  @person.name = ''
  @person.should_not be_valid
end

And, ultimately, that means RSpec wins.