Comment by benji-york

Your first and second points makes sense. They don't matter much to me, but I see how others could value those things.

Aside: I also don't like the hamcrest syntax. I also don't love unittest's syntax but it's OK and it's pervasive (i.e., available in the stdlib).

The third point is where I start to disagree more strongly.

> I like that there's nothing new to learn, the expressions work exactly like they do in any Python code, with no special test behavior or surprises.

This doesn't seem true to me.

> the expressions work exactly like they do in any Python code

Not to my mind. In normal Python, an assertion communicates something that is unequivocally believed to be true, not something that may or may not be true (a test). Let me see if I can explain it this way, I often use asserts in tests to show (and enforce) something that I believe to be true and must be true, before the test can have any meaning. E.g.,

assert test_condition() == False invoke_the_code_under_test() self.assertTrue(test_condition())

The "assert" communicates that this is a precondition, the "self.AssertTrue" communicates that this is a test.

I can 100% see that others might not see/care about the distinction, but I think it is important.

> no special test behavior

Well, that's not quite true. You have to handle the AssertionError specially and do some fairly magical work to figure out the details of the expression that failed. The unittest-style assertions just report the values passed into them.

I don't really like that magic, both from an aesthetic standpoint and from a least-complexity-in-my-tooling standpoint. Again, I can understand others making different tradeoffs.