A large collection of programmers already know how important it is to test their code. If you're among them, feel free to skim this section. You'll find the next section—where we actually see how to do the tests in Python—much more scintillating. If you're not convinced of the importance of testing, I promise that your code is broken, you just don't know it. Read on!
Some people argue that testing is more important in Python code because of its dynamic nature; compiled languages such as Java and C++ are occasionally thought to be somehow "safer" because they enforce type checking at compile time. However, Python tests rarely check types. They're checking values. They're making sure that the right attributes have been set at the right time or that the sequence has the right length, order, and values. These higher-level things need to be tested in any language. The real reason Python programmers test more than programmers of other languages is that it is so easy to test in Python...
