Comment by disgruntledphd2
9 months ago
It's important to note that Kent Beck is not one of those people, as he shipped the first unit testing library, as well as a bunch of ones in other languages later.
Like, I personally prefer the bare assert style of testing (like pytest), but the junit style is basically everywhere now.
Kent Beck is just as bad as Uncle Bob! He drank his own proverbial Kool-Aid and went all in on the crazy XP programming fad he started (... which contains brilliance like requiring pair programming for every line of code written).
Look, both authors are very smart people who have great insights into development that we can all learn from ... but both also have the failing of being way too in love with their own ideas.
It blinds them to the flaws in those ideas, and makes it so when you read their work you have to be skeptical and evaluate each individual idea on their own.
to come up with and advocate for paired programming before the concept existed _is_ pretty brilliant. And you also don't understand how much those practices improved software engineering, presumably because when you started programming they were already entrenched ideas, and so all you see are their shortcomings.
Those ideas do have flaws, and most of us are looking to improve how we right code. So if you aren't blind to those flaws, please, write a book or a blog or whatever on the best ways to write software so that we can all learn.
> which contains brilliance like requiring pair programming for every line of code written
Because it works. Have you tried it?
Force it on people, you'll see how much it works. Getting another pair of eyes on the code that you wrote is useful, but it's not free (effort, tolerance) and it's not for everyone. Just do proper code reviews. Middle ground.
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