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A few days ago, Robert C. Martin posted a blog post on The Pragmatics of TDD, where he explains that he doesn't test-drive everything. Some of the exceptions he give, such as not test-driving GUI code and true one-shot code, make sense to me, but there are two exceptions I think are inconsistent. Robert C. Martin states that he doesn't test-drive

Interesting clippings from the slides: "What can we do with it? * Write applications. Melodie uses lots of Smalltalk, first pure-Smalltalk app committed to svn in January. * Write scripts. Corner activation and gesture app uses Smalltalk for scripting. * Modify existing apps... " "We can inspect classes in a code browser, see method names, and write replacements in any running application. In a perfect Free Software system, any user can make any changes. "

My comment above might imply that Smalltalk is not modern. The truth is far from it, as Smalltalk is still pushing the boundaries of technology and user interfaces, from Croquet and Qwaq, to Alice, Sophie, Scratch and Etoys.

(I fixed Friday's broken link to the PDF.) From what I read so far, this seems to be another attempt at a fully introspecitve integrated and customisable personal computer with a graphical desktop. In other words, it is Dynabook Smalltalk and Lisp workstations all over again, but quite likely with some interesting modern twists.

"This post could be viewed as hard lessons learned for newly graduated college students, entry-level programmers, or advanced developers who just want a chuckle."

« We mistake what we said we'll do with what must be done. » « For every 1 day estimates of a task, there's a simpler version of that you can do in 3 hours, and an even simpler still you can do in 30 minutes. »

« In my experience, what most people consider to be their "best" people are often the root of most problems. It's the difference between troubleshooters and troublepreventers. »

« Fundamental changes to computer science education are required to better address the needs of industry. »