Comment by dreamcompiler

Completely agree. If everybody on the team has your attitude it's not a problem. But often, a few people don't. It's so damned tempting to reinvent a testing framework in Lisp, because we have lambdas and code is data right? Lisp is tailor-made for testing frameworks!

Until you're two weeks in to what you expected to be a 2-hour project and you realize you can't meta-dot your tests and you made too many assumptions about which equality functions to support, so you let the user just specify a lambda for the relation function and Poof! Now you can't reason about your tests nearly as well.

And oh yeah I used a macro-centric approach when I should have used CLOS so again, I can't easily grovel my tests. Damn.

Designing a test framework in Lisp looks easy but doing it well is surprisingly hard. So using one of the better ones in Quicklisp is almost always a win.

Just curious: Which one is your favorite?