Comment by righthand
16 days ago
It’s a great thought and this track has led me to wonder why no one is trying to build applications from BDD/gherkin statements.
It’s hard for me to believe that people are writing more technical documentation, understanding more, when they want to use the Llm to bypass that. Maybe a handful of disciplined engineers per capita but when the trend is largely the opposite, the academic approach tends to lose out.
Gherkin was always a pretty bad format that made it difficult to write terse, clear spectests. Inevitably the people who used it made horribly repetitive or horribly vague gherkin files that were equally bad for BDD and testing.
This is an artefact of the language which the creators are in total denial about.
There are better languages for writing executable user stories but none very popular.
bdd/gherkin are sometimes useful but they are not a great format to capture all the comblexity of the problem.
People don’t want to capture complexity of a problem, they want to play with word legos to output a prefabbed product. The simpler the interface the more likely that interface will win regardless how much nuance and expressiveness is allowed with a full language system.