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I am still at an early stage in my career. Anecdotally, I've noticed that the most vocal proponents of TDD are older men who come from Ruby, Python, or vanilla

I am still at an early stage in my career. Anecdotally, I've noticed that the most vocal proponents of TDD are older men who come from Ruby, Python, or vanilla JS backgrounds. All the examples in the article are from liberally typed languages as well. To what extent do you think this approach and these languages correlate with one another? I'm not saying rigorous typing eliminates the need to test things entirely, but for the fully functional Scala, Haskell, and Typescript I'm tasked to write, TDD seems obnoxiously myopic. I mean, I'm sure it's obnoxiously myopic in unsafe languages as well, but at least its benefits are more obvious there.

pjc50 5y ago
Yes - to me, types are a form of test, but a potentially exhaustive one. If you can prove a property with types you don't need to do it with tests. Conversely, if you don't have types, you need quite a lot of tests to prove your code doesn't immediately fall over if presented with badly formed data structures.
beaker52 5y ago
(I see you're still in the early stages of your career so I'm assuming life, too) > most vocal proponents of TDD are older men Being older means that you've been part of this rodeo longer than other people. Sometimes that means those older people wield useful wisdom unavailable to the not-so-old. Sometimes it means those older people have wisdom that is no longer relevant to the present moment. As a not-so-old person, it's your job to listen and make up your own mind about your elders. But when these older people were your age, they too looked up at their elders with the same caution, and they made their journey to where they are today, handing down the wisdom that they believe is valuable, to you. Now, maybe times have changed and their wisdom has fallen from relevancy - that is for you to decide, but, from experience, you're probably going to reinvent the wheel a lot in your life. And you'll pass your wisdom down to those following you, who might end up reinventing it too. There's a reason the wheel is the invention to avoid reinventing :) And being men has nothing to do with the price of bread ;)

pjc50 5y ago

Yes - to me, types are a form of test, but a potentially exhaustive one. If you can prove a property with types you don't need to do it with tests. Conversely, if you don't have types, you need quite a lot of tests to prove your code doesn't immediately fall over if presented with badly formed data structures.

beaker52 5y ago

(I see you're still in the early stages of your career so I'm assuming life, too) > most vocal proponents of TDD are older men Being older means that you've been part of this rodeo longer than other people. Sometimes that means those older people wield useful wisdom unavailable to the not-so-old. Sometimes it means those older people have wisdom that is no longer relevant to the present moment. As a not-so-old person, it's your job to listen and make up your own mind about your elders. But when these older people were your age, they too looked up at their elders with the same caution, and they made their journey to where they are today, handing down the wisdom that they believe is valuable, to you. Now, maybe times have changed and their wisdom has fallen from relevancy - that is for you to decide, but, from experience, you're probably going to reinvent the wheel a lot in your life. And you'll pass your wisdom down to those following you, who might end up reinventing it too. There's a reason the wheel is the invention to avoid reinventing :) And being men has nothing to do with the price of bread ;)