Comment by sooheon

6 years ago

Rich Hickey called it guard rail driven programming. You'll never drive where you want to go if you just get on the highway and bump off the guard rails.

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sooheon

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carlmr  6 years ago

Except that's a really bad analogy. It's more like you set up guard rails, and every time your vehicle hits a guard rail you change the algorithm it uses for navigation until it can do a whole run without hitting a guard rail.

I've experienced myself how the code quality of proper TDD code can be amazing. However it needs someone to still actually care about what they're doing. So it doesn't help with idiots.

  • mannykannot  6 years ago

    It is not be a good analogy for TDD as properly practiced, but it seems to be very fitting for the situation described at the top of this thread, and that is far from being a unique case.

  • sooheon  6 years ago

    I don't think it's a generous analogy, but it's poking fun at being test DRIVEN, rather than driver driven. I think he'd agree with you that it's the thinking and navigating and "actually caring about what they're doing" that matters. Tests are a tool to aid that. Tests don't sit in the driver's seat.

    • mikekchar  6 years ago

      Yeah. To me "test driven" really means that I write code under the constraints that it has to make writing my tests sensible and easy. This turns out to improve design in a large number of cases. There are lots of other constraints you can use that tend to improve design as well (method size, parameter list size, number of object attributes, etc are other well known ones). But "test driven" is a nice catch phrase.

  • corobo  6 years ago

    > Except that's a really bad analogy. It's more like

    The response to every analogy ever made on the internet. Can we stop using them yet?

    • carlmr  6 years ago

      Spot on: "Analogies: Analogies are good tools for explaining a concept to someone for the first time. But because analogies are imperfect they are the worst way to persuade. All discussions that involve analogies devolve into arguments about the quality of the analogy, not the underlying situation." - Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert (I know he's quite controversial since the election, but he's on point here) in https://blog.dilbert.com/2016/12/21/how-to-be-unpersuasive/

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