In the spirit of the many falsehoods programmers believe about {thing} lists, I present falsehoods programmers believe about words.
My experiences with linguistics and engineering have led me to the realization that there are numerous falsehoods programmers believe about words and shockingly no one has seemingly written a falsehoods programmers believe about words yet.1 This is a blend of literal words and writing systems – mostly because text is what we interact with most frequently when we interact with language.2
“Is that failure a flaky test? — We can ignore that failure, it’s a flake — Let me rerun these; that’s a flake.” everywhere that I’ve worked; every team I’ve worked with; I’ve heard these or similar.1 When I was earlier in my career this felt reassuring and calming. The test failed, but it’s ok! It sometimes just does that, click re-run and move on. Simple!
But it also left me unsatisfied: I couldn’t ever stop that nagging voice in my head from asking “but why?”. Ultimately after some sleepless nights and a number of deep dives into the specific so-called flaky tests, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as a flaky test.