Comment by jibal
2 months ago
I was just reading about Ron Jeffries' disastrous attempts to write a Sudoku program because he dogmatically refused to do any preparatory work--including spending any time at all thinking about the nature of the problem and what sorts of data structures would be suitable for solving it.
As I see it he was doing exactly the opposite: prep work in terms of doing the tests.
That's obviously not "prep work", and in any case obviously not the sort I'm obviously referring to, so obviously not "exactly the opposite".
He was coding everything around: checking the validity of moves, auxiliary code, win conditions and on. Anything but the algorithm itself, likely for the lack of experience. Doing the thing here would have been figuring out the algorithm and sitting down to code it which probably felt intimidating. So yeah it was exactly the opposite.
Someone doesn't know what "opposite" means or pretends not to.