I've tried to replicate your issue in the Elm testing library I'm a maintainer of, which uses some of the core ideas from Hypothesis.
It was able to generate values just fine ([1]), so your problems might have been just some issue of the Hypothesis _implementation_ instead of something wrong with the general algorithm?
Note that your usage of Hypothesis was "weird" in two aspects:
1. You're using the test runner for generation of data. That's sometimes useful, particularly when you need to find a specific example passing some specific non-trivial property (eg. how people solve the wolf, goat, cabbage puzzle with PBT - "computer, I'm declaring it's impossible to solve the puzzle, prove me wrong!"), but your particular example had just "assert True" inside, so you were just generating data.
There might be libraries better suited to the task. Elm has packages elm/random (for generation of data) and elm-explorations/test (for PBT and testing in general). Maybe Clojure or Python have a faker library that doesn't concern itself with shrinking, which would be a better tool for your task. The below gist [1] has an example of using a generator library instead of a testing library as well.
2. You were generating then filtering (for "at least one non-0 values across a column"). That's usually worse than constructively generating the data you want. An example alternative to the filtering approach might be to generate data, and then if a column has all zeroes, generate a number from range 1..MAXINT to replace the first row's column with. Anyways, "all zeroes" shouldn't happen all that often so it's probably not a huge concern that you filtered.
The code provided was not real test code. The only reason `assert True` is there is to highlight the fact that the issue was with generation, and not any other part of the test.
> Anyways, "all zeroes" shouldn't happen all that often so it's probably not a huge concern that you filtered.
This is really the point.
Like I said, Clojure’s spec (with or without test.check) has no trouble.
It was able to generate values just fine ([1]), so your problems might have been just some issue of the Hypothesis _implementation_ instead of something wrong with the general algorithm?
Note that your usage of Hypothesis was "weird" in two aspects:
1. You're using the test runner for generation of data. That's sometimes useful, particularly when you need to find a specific example passing some specific non-trivial property (eg. how people solve the wolf, goat, cabbage puzzle with PBT - "computer, I'm declaring it's impossible to solve the puzzle, prove me wrong!"), but your particular example had just "assert True" inside, so you were just generating data.
There might be libraries better suited to the task. Elm has packages elm/random (for generation of data) and elm-explorations/test (for PBT and testing in general). Maybe Clojure or Python have a faker library that doesn't concern itself with shrinking, which would be a better tool for your task. The below gist [1] has an example of using a generator library instead of a testing library as well.
2. You were generating then filtering (for "at least one non-0 values across a column"). That's usually worse than constructively generating the data you want. An example alternative to the filtering approach might be to generate data, and then if a column has all zeroes, generate a number from range 1..MAXINT to replace the first row's column with. Anyways, "all zeroes" shouldn't happen all that often so it's probably not a huge concern that you filtered.
[1]: https://gist.github.com/Janiczek/c71050aa89fb0b19d73e683f9a3...