As a foil, I very much appreciate that Ruby has a single standard Test::Unit module that apparently everyone uses. It comes with the standard distribution, and it seems reasonably complete and well architected. It's sad that Perl does not have something similar.

Perl does :-)

Perl's standard testing framework is Test::Harness, Test::Builder and Test::More. These have all been core (i.e. they come with the standard distribution) since 5.007003, long before Test::Unit was a core part of Ruby.

Indeed, Test::Unit is a fairly recent addition to Ruby, we were all using RubyUnit not too long ago.

Anybody who is writing test suites and not using Test::Builder based modules is (unless they are dealing with a legacy test suite) making a mistake.

IMHO anyway :-)

If you're doing testing work in Perl I strongly recommend that you join the perl-qa mailing list and take a gander at the material on http://qa.perl.org/.

TIMTOWTDI is a double edged sword, the consequence of which is often that people end up speaking very different dialects of the same language, to the point that communication is stifled, or at least stilted.

The bewildering array of testing modules on CPAN is actually less complicated than it looks.

The majority of testing modules on CPAN are built with Test::Builder and work together with the core Test::More. They're not competitors - they're specialists.

Modules like Test::ISBN, Test::Pod::Coverage and Test::Exception are not alternatives to the core testing framework - they're extensions. They just make testing (in this particular instance) ISBN numbers, POD coverage and exceptions easier than with Test::More.

The difference between Ruby and Perl testing frameworks is really down to more people using Perl for testing work over a longer period of time, rather than TIMTOWTDI. One of the few things I miss from Perl in the Ruby world is the excellent specialised testing tools that Perl gives me.