jimmyhmiller

I try to explain what I mean the next few sentences of the post. I have spent a good amount of my career jumping into fairly large code bases. I don't need to take it quite so step by step. I have seen enough code to take shortcuts, to guess at what is there.

But telling people that isn't helpful. I try at the beginning to give more step by step of how I would get into understand the code base if I didn't already know these kinds of shortcuts. (I'm not sure I could write those down, they are just know how and heuristics, like how when you are a starting to code a missing ; can take a much longer time to see than as you've been programming for a while)

As in munching on snacks

Yeah, you could very well be right this is all overkill. But what I wanted to do was handle the general case rather than deal with things on a case by case basis. So to extend your analogy, I consider this blog post a parser generator. It isn't suppose to parse any particular text, but to allow you to create a parser for anything you want.

I've found that my short replies to empirical advocates seem to not connect. There seemed to be an assumption that I just wanted to hold onto my opinions and not think deeply about anything. So I wanted to do the exact opposite. Be as pedantic as I could (in the space of a shortish blogpost).

I think you missed the point of the article. I actually don’t do TDD at all. I’m actually personally not a fan. So feels a little weird that you thought this was an article trying to justify TDD use.

The TDD example was just an example. I wasn’t taking the actual finding of the TDD research I was talking about a hypothetical finding. You can replace the examples with AIs like copilot and stipulate a large effect size. Nothing I said would really change. You still have to look at your desires to figure out what you ought to do given that research.

In the article I’m assuming ideal conditions. So if you think a large effect size is important, throw that into the ideal conditions. I don’t think that changes anything I wrote. Maybe I’m missing something?

Yeah feel like an idiot for this one accidentally submitted this on mobile without noticing the autocorrect putting spaces. And the missing of io. And the fact that it was the title not the url… I wasn’t actually trying to submit. Just fat fingered it. Made a new post. Would love if this was deleted.

I think all papers are flawed in their own way. So it is not meant as a slight. It is actually my favorite programming related paper. That said:

I think Naur was just a bit to vague and assumed background knowledge of Gilbert Ryle where most people don't have any. I think a lot of people finish reading the paper and don't realize what Naur's notion of theory is or how his radical conclusions follow.