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A comment on TDD did not live up to expectations. Parent comment

Re:TDD did not live up to expectations by ajross on Thursday June 29, 2017 @12:42PM (#14664676)
To be fair (and I'm no TDD fan personally), that mess wasn't really the fault of TDD at all. It was that Jeffries was learning how to write a Sudoku solver while he was writing his tests. If he started from Norvig's level of understanding, he surely could have written tests for an equivalently elegant solver quickly and simply.

Learning how to solve a problem by iterative coding (and throwing away the intermediate solutions) is a time-honored tradition that works very well. TDD may be an imperfect vehicle for doing that, but it doesn't really change the calculus.

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Re:TDD did not live up to expectations by willvarfar on Thursday June 29, 2017 @01:19PM (#14665012)
The whole thing at the time was 'test driven design' - the idea that by writing tests, you could iterate your way to algorithms that solve problems you couldn't solve by critical up-front thinking.

Test Driven Design fizzled and quietly died just after the Sudoku Fiasco ;)

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