3 ms·

Can you explain more fully, please?

• angelbob 17y ago
  Presumably he's saying that if you don't write tests you can code faster. I agree with the original poster -- it's important to slow down and think about the problem. Then again, I'm a big fan of trying hard not to write code you already understand too well -- that means that you're repeating yourself :-)
  • silentbicycle 17y ago
    In some cases, couldn't the tests be the code? That's the declarative programming ideal, anyway - starting with a straightforward spec of the problem, running it, and then gradually fleshing out just the parts that need to be optimized. Sometimes, writing what I want and then writing step-by-step directions for how to do it feels like I'm repeating myself. Prolog is far from perfect (its default search mechanism gets stuck in left-recursive clauses), but it's a start, and computers have gotten considerably faster since the 70s... AFAIK, the best known success of declarative programming is writing a pattern matching specification (with ML, Prolog, Erlang, Haskell, or various Lisp macros) and compiling it to the necessary nested if / switch statements, rather than generating it by hand. I guess it overlaps with parser generators, and some other DSLs, too.