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THE VIDEO SHELF · property-based testing

John Hughes - Testing the Hard Stuff and Staying Sane

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.

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Why HN readers recommended it

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

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel
ClojureTV
Topic
property-based testing
Format
talk
Level
intermediate
HN recommenders in dataset
4
HN mentions in dataset
6
Recommendation years in dataset
2016–2026

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

  • 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 …

    Naomarik on Hacker News · 2016-12
    In QuickCheck: A Lightweight Tool for Random Testing of Haskell Programs (2000) [pdf]

  • While of course Haskell has more normal testing infrastructure available (eg. [LINK] ), my favorite bit of Haskell testing is QuickCheck, which IIUC started life in Haskell and has been reimplemented in other languages with various degrees of effectiveness and various degrees of connection to …

    dllthomas on Hacker News · 2022-10
    In Show HN: IHP v1.0 – Batteries-included web framework built on Haskell and Nix

  • 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 …

    robertfw on Hacker News · 2025-11
    In Hypothesis: Property-Based Testing for Python

Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.

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