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Showing posts from July, 2007

TDD, or not TDD?

I'm pretty convinced that TDD (or better yet, BDD ) is the way to go. As usual when I get to this stage, I no longer care a lot to discuss the issue. However, I just hit on an interesting article ... one that I find particularly weird. Ravi's point appears to be that TDD is rather useless... and / or that Peter Norvig is a much better programmer than Ron Jeffries. The thing is, as I said here I managed to solve the whole thing in about 8 hours total. Worse, I only did that once I started with a consistent test-first approach, my previous 3 or 4 attempts ended in failure. So. While I have a huge ego (not so huge not to accept Peter Norvig as a better programmer than me though), I have strong doubts that I'm a better programmer than Ron Jeffries. I think that Vlad's article hits on part of a problem: discovering an algorithm using TDD is at least difficult, if not impossible - and TDD was not meant for that. I also think that Ron simply gave up - in fact, I also did tha