"Did you know, working software has existed for 30++ years, performing its job day after day, before TDD was conceived and marketed to the world?" No, I did no

"Did you know, working software has existed for 30++ years, performing its job day after day, before TDD was conceived and marketed to the world?" No, I did not. Thanks for that tidbit. To return the favor, here's another data point: Did you know, shitty software has existed for 30++ years, failing at its job day after day, before people were knocking TDD and its marketing to the world? That's right: there's been good and bad code for quite some time. Who wrote that bad code? Well, the assertion was that "[g]ood programmers will write good code", so it wasn't them. I find that an amazing claim, absent any evidence. At best, it's either tautological or a No True Scotsman sort of thing: anyone who ever wrote bad good is by definition not a good programmer. My own anecdotal evidence says that good programmers sometimes write bad good. Maybe not often, maybe not on purpose, but it happens. You code yourself into a corner; you make a bad guess on something. Just like great athletes have a bad game, or a great musicians an off gig. Let's suppose I'm over-interpreting the assertion. Suppose the claim was really meant to mean that good programmers will usually or typically write good code regardless of whether or not they use TDD or not. Well, that invites the awkward question of would they write good code more often using TDD? I think yes, but have no more of a data-backed argument for that than the article has against it. The existence of working code says nothing about whether good programmers always write good code regardless of TDD, or whether they would or would not write good code more often using TDD. "People might take TDD advocates a bit more seriously if they dropped this assertion that if you aren't using TDD, or even worse, if you're not even writing tests for your code, you are doomed!" People might take TDD critics a bit more seriously if they stopped trotting out shit like that because no one with an ounce of brains argues that, except perhaps to troll people into writing shrill blog posts.