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Comment by steveklabnik

4 days ago

Hi! Sorry, I was trying to be a bit tongue in cheek here. This space, in my experience, has always been frustrating, because it's a hard problem. I myself am fighting with Playwright these days, just like I used to fight with Selenium. (And, to my understanding, you created Selenium due to frustrations with Mercury, hence the name... I'm curious if that's true or just something I heard!)

I still deeply appreciate these tools, even though I also find them a bit frustrating.

3 comments

steveklabnik

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hugs  4 days ago

it's all good, man. if it makes you feel better, i don't like rust. ;-) my eldest son loves it, though!

fun-fact: i've never used mercury. when i came up with "selenium" -- it was because a colleague saw an early demo and said it had the potential to "kill mercury". (spoiler alert!)

but in that moment, i hadn't heard of mercury before, so i had to google it. i then also spent a few extra cycles googling around for a "cure for mercury poisoning" just so i could continue the conversation with that colleague with a proto-dad-joke... and landed on a page about selenium supplements. things obviously got out of hand.

i didn't want to call the project "selenium". i preferred the name "check engine", but people started calling it "selenium" anyway. i only wish nice things for the mercury team -- the only thing i know about them is that hp acquired mercury for $4.5B. so i hope they blissfully don't care about me or my bad dad-jokes.

but again... i didn't realize there was an entire testing tools industry at that moment. all i knew was that i had a testing problem for my complicated web app -- and the consensus professional advice at the time was "yeah, no. don't use javascript in the browser -- it's too hard to test". (another spoiler.) also, (if i'm remembering correctly) mercury was ie/windows only... and i needed something that supported apple and mozilla/firefox. it felt like zero vendors at the time cared about anything that wasn't internet explorer or wasn't windows. so i had to chart my own course pretty quickly.

long story long: "you either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain" - harvey dent

  • steveklabnik  4 days ago

    > it's all good, man. if it makes you feel better, i don't like rust. ;-) my eldest son loves it, though!

    Ha! Yeah, it's no worries at all, I think it's fine to not like things. Everybody is different. And for these sorts of things, it's kind of a "there are two kinds of tools, the ones people complain about, and the ones they don't use" sort of situation: if I didn't think it was valuable, I just wouldn't use it. But it's valuable enough to use despite the griping at times.

    Thank you for the story!