> I'm curious on the thesis. I'm assuming "locked in by tests" increments are the problem? I'm curious why you couldn't treat this like any learning task where you can take efforts that are effectively larger steps to see where they can get you?
Here's a quote from TFA on this (using >> for quotes from TFA)
>> But Jeffries isn't in the business of starting over. He not only believes in incremental design, but in using the smallest possible increments. In his posts, he regularly returns to GeePaw Hill's maxim of "many more much smaller steps." He is only interested in designs that are reachable through a series of small, discrete steps:
and later
>> Jeffries, however, does not believe in bigger pictures; his approach to software design is proudly myopic. He prevents himself from seeing the forest by pressing his face against the trees.
> I should also note that I am not clear I understand how bad of a representation of the board you could get locked with. I got a working solver years ago with what is almost certainly a poor representation. https://taeric.github.io/Sudoku.html
First a point of clarification; Jeffries also gets a working solver; not in the original episode you may have heard of but in a series of forty-five articles 18[1] years after the infamous incident; TFA focuses almost entirely on this (successful) attempt.
Once Jeffries has a working solver he attempts to simplify it, and TFA makes the claim that these attempts are hindered by the choice of Option[Int] for each cell rather than a Set[Int] (i.e. a set of remaining legal values). This results in Norvig's code being significantly more succinct than Jeffries' code, even when implementing the same heuristic.
1: This originally read "two" due to quick skimming on my part.