I agree that this particular argument is pretty pointless, and I even believe that there are plenty of examples of people programming with TDD and having great

I agree that this particular argument is pretty pointless, and I even believe that there are plenty of examples of people programming with TDD and having great results. My only problem with the TDD paradigm is that it doesn't work with the way I think about software. It isn't so much about having a formal correctness proof, but when I'm writing code, its incredibly more valuable to me to think it through, reason about the various inputs and outputs, and convince myself that it is a correct solution. And although I usually don't, I see the value in writing tests to verify some of the assumptions you made. I don't, however, see the logic in starting from a set of tests (especially ones that can't possibly know about the specific "pressure points" of the code you will eventually write) and then deriving the solution. But that's just me, and as they say, different strokes...