The Bet I Made Earlier

A few months ago I moved a whole app from HAML to ERB . The argument was partly about ecosystem alignment, but the forward-looking part was a bet: once ReActionView and Herb stabilized, ERB would be the on-ramp to HTML-aware templates, real validation, and actual tooling for the view layer.

This week I collected on that bet, in a different app. My order management system for cafes and restaurants had a problem I had written down in its own docs and then ignored:

test/system/ is empty, so nothing exercises rendered views end to end. Controller tests use fixtures that often lack the interesting rows (for example, no fixture order has an extra line item component, which is why a crash in the bill view went unnoticed).

A view crashed in production-ish usage and no test caught it, because no test rendered that branch.…