Over the years I've gone from writing no tests at all, to being a die hard TDD purist, and then out the other side to writing some things with tests first, othe

Over the years I've gone from writing no tests at all, to being a die hard TDD purist, and then out the other side to writing some things with tests first, others with tests after writing the code, and some without any tests at all. Hear, hear! Exactly the same here, for the same reasons as you and the OP mention. And observed fom a distance, it's always the same universal principle: purist behaviour (in the sense of almost religous beliefs that something is a strict rule, sentence starting with Always etc you get the point) in programing or to a further extent, in life, is nearly always wrong, period. No matter what the rule is, you can pretty much always find yourself in a situation where the rule is not the best choice.