interesting considerations! thanks for sharing them,

I jump on this occasion to write about this project that you mentioned on the top of your article: it comes from admiring the idea of literate programming and applying it to the more specific area of testing. One leverage of good testing is the number of tests that you can provide, I’m sure there is a limit to this but more or less : the more the better. So if you have a way of writing tests that is very simple and “self-documenting” (as in each tests expose what it is about), you can get more people writing tests and more relevant tests. Some previous art in the domain (or examples and that impressed me) are http://rspec.info/ and http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/137928. My testing thing is built around the same principles but it applies less to checking an expected behaviour in an application, and more to the shape of some data arrays.

Pierre