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Comment by nkurz | Hacker News Reader

OK, someone just give me the answer: is this designed as an example of what one should do, or is it a parable of what not to do?

I started reading it earlier today, and gave up once I hit the sexist tone. Then seeing the comments here, I realized that it was just parodying Heinlein. Cuz it's not really sexist if you're quoting, right? Anyway, given all the upvotes I thought there must be something to the article.

In the same way, at the start I thought that ridiculously verbose ad-hoc testing functions were also a parody. Surely his point was going to be that your time is better spent writing a testing framework that reads from a text file rather than writing a 95% duplicate function for each test?

But then I got to the end, and I lost my faith. Is he mocking Heinlein or just channeling some unrepentant 60's SciFi sexism? And is he really suggesting that this is really a good way to write software?

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I don't think it's a parody, because I can see what he's getting at. If the programmer had written the "simpler" test first, he might have stumbled upon the algorithm as illustrated without the false starts at the beginning, and then it would seem like more of a successful approach.

Then again, I'm not sure how you're supposed to know which tests are the magic ones which will guide you to a solution, and the author conveniently trails off without telling us.

(I'm also not sure what happened to first sitting down with a pen and paper and figuring out the algorithm, instead of praying to the TDD gods that you might magically stub your toe on it.)

> Then again, I'm not sure how you're supposed to know which tests are the magic ones which will guide you to a solution, and the author conveniently trails off without telling us.

Oh ye of little faith: you just do it the same way you know which magic refactorings to apply once your code is working, to turn your test-passing ad-hoc spaghetti into a clean, maintainable design. :-)

> (I'm also not sure what happened to first sitting down with a pen and paper and figuring out the algorithm, instead of praying to the TDD gods that you might magically stub your toe on it.)

Indeed. My current project for one client is building a user interface. I just spent nearly a week writing a design spec -- though some might call it a math paper -- to prove that all those transformations I'm planning to do to get from a user-friendly description of the situation to a hardware-friendly one are actually going to work. The TDD gods would no doubt consider me a heretic, but I suspect that I'll somehow avoid eternal damnation (as long as I write some tests later, of course).

Lots of ways to interpret it, but stripping back the story, it's showing a technique to sharpen your skills and looking at a problem in different ways.

As you say there are definitely better ways to test the actual wrapper class in a real life situation, but showing the test suites one by one gives the reader a chance to see how the narrator approaches the problem and various situations are word-wrap class would face.

If you were set your own 'katas' and reproduce similar code from scratch or a framework, I can see it helping some people look at various problems in different ways and look objectively at how they solve them. Every person has their own methods all the same.

I was going to reply to this, but suddenly I flashed back to a lot of Usenet arguments from about fifteen years ago and thought better of it. I quote Tim Skirvin's Godwin's Law faq:

8. Are there any topics that lead directly to Godwin Invocations? Well, yeah. Of course. Case's Corollary to the Law states "if the subject is Heinlein or homosexuality, the probability of a Hitler/Nazi comparison being made becomes equal to one"

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