Re:"Normal" engineers are the key to great teams
by throwaway2037 on Thursday March 13, 2025 @09:32PM
(#43358820)
I would disagree about TDD. I am continuously surprised when I learn that yet another one of my teammates practices TDD. TL;DR: TDD is dead; long live TDD. I think that TDD will remain viable in enterprise programmer for decades, perhaps permanently, thanks to "vibe-coding", where LLMs eventually produce most code for CRUD projects (the vast majority of enterprise programming).
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Re:"Normal" engineers are the key to great teams
by TylerE on Thursday March 13, 2025 @11:18PM
(#43359291)
Just to be clear, do you mean full-dogma Rails tutorial write a bunch of trivial tests before writing code TDD?
Re:"Normal" engineers are the key to great teams
by throwaway2037 on Friday March 14, 2025 @12:37AM
(#43359614)
Yes, exactly this. I never bought into TDD, but I can understand that it brings comfort for many normie enterprise CRUD developers... of which I am one myself!
Re:"Normal" engineers are the key to great teams
by TylerE on Friday March 14, 2025 @01:13AM
(#43359777)
I despise it because I've seen some absolutely HORRIBLE designs that excessively separate concerns (that are actually linked and shouldn't be) in the name of "testability". I would rather maintain 50 lines of clear idiomatic code than 1000 lines of TDD code salad full of 3 line functions that each take a bunch of fragile mocks.
It's also my experience that a few well written integration tests are more useful and catch more actual bugs than a million unit tests. This is especially true of web apps which are inherently highly stateful.
The most powerful design paradigm I have ever found is to spend the first, say, 10-20% of my time making a rough prototype. Not with an eye of actually using a single line of it (although it happens) but just to do the quickest and dirtiest possible exploration of what the actual problem is.