hackertube.io

John Hughes - Testing the Hard Stuff and Staying Sane

ClojureTV · talk · Watch on YouTube

Testing, debugging & developer toolsFunctional programming

What it is

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.

Why Hacker News recommends it

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

  • 4 people recommended it
  • 4 different months
  • 1 strong recommendations
  • first 2016, last 2026

What HN commenters said

  1. “I'd recommend watching this”

    Shows how powerful generative testing can be.

    Naomarik, 2016-12 · Strong recommendation · in “QuickCheck: A Lightweight Tool for Random Testing of Haskell Programs (2000) [pdf]”

  2. “John Hughes (not the filmmaker) gives a great talk about it”

    Hughes on QuickCheck property-based testing.

    dllthomas, 2022-10 · Recommendation · in “Show HN: IHP v1.0 – Batteries-included web framework built on Haskell and Nix”

  3. “there is real value in this approach with production systems of varying levels of complexity”

    Two production examples finding very low-level bugs.

    robertfw, 2025-11 · Recommendation · in “Hypothesis: Property-Based Testing for Python”

  4. “Worth a watch if you're interested”

    Hughes's talk on property-based testing.

    devin, 2026-04 · Recommendation · in “Mysteries of Dropbox: Property-Based Testing of a Distributed Sync Service [pdf]”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: quickcheck, property-based testing, generative testing, can bus, john hughes

Also recommended by the same people