Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

"Joel Spolksy is wrong about my work" - Kent Beck

threeriversinstitute.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 100 posts

Re: "Joel Spolksy is wrong about my work" - Kent Beck

#31

Post by swombat »

paul wrote: post #14
lacker wrote: post #4

Here's a transcript of the podcast I believe Kent is referring to. Judge for yourself whether Joel "makes comments that make clear his lack of knowledge". http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/01/31.html I'd like to see Kent respond to Joel's specific points. E.g: The real problem with unit tests as I've discovered is that the type of changes that you tend to make as code evolves tend to break a constant percentag…

I think I agree with everything Joel said in that post. These crazy rules people come up with for "proper object oriented" programming remind me of extreme religious rituals. You have to observe all these stupid little rules or else your code will become impure you and will spend an eternity in code maintenance hell. I'll make a somewhat heretical claim even: Unit test are 20% useful engineering, and 80% fad. They ar…

Are you objecting to cultish behaviour like TATFT (Test All The F'ing Time), or to comprehensive testing in general?

Also, are you objecting only to low-level unit tests, or to "integration tests" as well? (i.e. unit tests with a much larger "unit")

I don't TATFT. My metric for deciding what tests to write is "is it likely to break in a non-obvious manner?" If a breakage in this code will cause the application not to run at all, there's not all that much point in testing that. However, if the code is likely to result in some weird errors that will be hard to track down, I feel writing tests is a very good investment.

Re: "Joel Spolksy is wrong about my work" - Kent Beck

#32

Post by Angostura »

dasil003 wrote: post #19
andreyf wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never heard of this guy before, but considering that he just wrote 3 paragraphs eloquently saying "Joel is an idiot" without saying anything about how they disagree makes me think quite little of him. Ad hominem attacks are rhetoric - meant to influence, not inform. See How to Disagree, by PG: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

Joel dragged him into this by name. Clearly he thinks Joel is attributing ideas to him that he doesn't hold. Therefore it's not a matter of disagreement--he may well fully agree with Joel's thesis--it's the demonization of his work by misrepresentation. In that light his response seems measured and appropriate.

It may be measured, but it's not helpful.

Let's assume that Joel is neither stupid nor malicious. Therefore he is having problems that presumably others are having. In this case it is useful to actually set out the nature of Joel's error, rather than simply saying "Joel is a dolt". Non-malicious criticism can often be helpful in letting you explore why people misunderstand you.

Of course my assumptions could be wrong - he could believe that Joel is being malicious.

Re: "Joel Spolksy is wrong about my work" - Kent Beck

#33

Post by fizx »

swombat wrote: post #30
axod wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, in theory. However, when you're quickly iterating, redesigning, changing how things work, having to completely rework the unit tests as well is pretty much wasted effort. I think it depends on the project - is it a 'design up front, go away code once' project, or an iterative constantly changing thing.

'Fraid not, axod. It's when you're quickly iterating and changing lots of stuff that quality unit testing helps you the most. Let's look at 2 possible scenarios: 1) You don't bother testing much. You make lots of changes, iterate quickly. Before the changes, you have code that, let's say, you know works. After the changes, you know there's probably bugs, but you don't know where. 2) You test fairly thoroughly. You ma…

I'll chime in from recent experience. I had to pull a dependency in my project because it was causing heisenbugs that I couldn't root out. Without tests, I wouldn't have known. With tests, it took 2 hours to replace (diff -200 +250), and I'm confident the library still works. Without tests, it would have taken several more, at least.

Re: "Joel Spolksy is wrong about my work" - Kent Beck

#34

Post by michaelneale »

patio11 wrote: post #5
dasil003 wrote: post #2

It sucks to have your life's work strawmanned like this by pop programmer podcast banter. I hope Joel addresses it professionally. XP/Agile/TDD (like any movement) is filled with rabid fanboys who misapply the principles and try to ram them down everyone's throat, but it's rarely the case that the inventors of popular methodologies are filled with the same blind zeal. After all, their ideas were originally informed b…

But what happens when you stick inventor of popular methodology A against inventor of popular methodology B? Is the disagreement blind zeal or professional opinions originally informed by first-hand experience? Or is the whole thing just like duct-taping buttered toast to the back of a cat and then pushing it off a high surface? (Toast always ends buttered side down. Cats always land feet first. Thus, if either lands…

Joel pushed no "methodology" in that sense at all. What I see is Kent Beck, who pushes a methodology which has taken up a religious like following in "IT" or corporate developer circles. Joel just ships software, and judges things in terms of commercial success in the market place.

Re: "Joel Spolksy is wrong about my work" - Kent Beck

#35

Post by jhancock »

andreyf wrote: post #16
dasil003 wrote: post #2

It sucks to have your life's work strawmanned like this by pop programmer podcast banter. I hope Joel addresses it professionally. XP/Agile/TDD (like any movement) is filled with rabid fanboys who misapply the principles and try to ram them down everyone's throat, but it's rarely the case that the inventors of popular methodologies are filled with the same blind zeal. After all, their ideas were originally informed b…

Never heard of this guy before, but considering that he just wrote 3 paragraphs eloquently saying "Joel is an idiot" without saying anything about how they disagree makes me think quite little of him. Ad hominem attacks are rhetoric - meant to influence, not inform. See How to Disagree, by PG: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

Kent Beck is one of the original Smalltalkers....way back. If I recall correctly, Kent won the "competition" for the best answer to "How many lines of code does your app have?". His answer (best recollection) was "lots, but with some effort I was able to remove most of them".

Kent and his circle of friends were refactoring before there was a word for it; when XP and all its many ancillary methods were just called "best practices".

Not sure I've ever seen him publish something like this before. This is part of the problem with dismissing people over the Internet without really knowing their backgrounds. It is very easy to make a fool of yourself.

I think he treated Joel fairly. He was complimentary to Joel's efforts in writing but simply told him that he doesn't really know him and should be more careful with his opinions.

Re: "Joel Spolksy is wrong about my work" - Kent Beck

#36

Post by hboon »

swombat wrote: post #29
andreyf wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never heard of this guy before, but considering that he just wrote 3 paragraphs eloquently saying "Joel is an idiot" without saying anything about how they disagree makes me think quite little of him. Ad hominem attacks are rhetoric - meant to influence, not inform. See How to Disagree, by PG: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

Kent Beck is the creator of Extreme Programming, one of the fathers of Test-Driven-Design and a bunch of other agile practices. Quite well known amongst most programmer circles. More info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_Beck

He also co-wrote JUnit and wrote SUnit which spawned the many other counterparts in other languages and wrote one of the better Smalltalk books.

Re: "Joel Spolksy is wrong about my work" - Kent Beck

#37

Post by axod »

swombat wrote: post #30
axod wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, in theory. However, when you're quickly iterating, redesigning, changing how things work, having to completely rework the unit tests as well is pretty much wasted effort. I think it depends on the project - is it a 'design up front, go away code once' project, or an iterative constantly changing thing.

'Fraid not, axod. It's when you're quickly iterating and changing lots of stuff that quality unit testing helps you the most. Let's look at 2 possible scenarios: 1) You don't bother testing much. You make lots of changes, iterate quickly. Before the changes, you have code that, let's say, you know works. After the changes, you know there's probably bugs, but you don't know where. 2) You test fairly thoroughly. You ma…

I disagree.

If I'm constantly changing my mind about how best to do something, I don't want the massive overhead of having to change unit tests all the time as well.

I'll test as I go, in the code.

Re: "Joel Spolksy is wrong about my work" - Kent Beck

#38

Post by jrockway »

paul wrote: post #14
lacker wrote: post #4

Here's a transcript of the podcast I believe Kent is referring to. Judge for yourself whether Joel "makes comments that make clear his lack of knowledge". http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/01/31.html I'd like to see Kent respond to Joel's specific points. E.g: The real problem with unit tests as I've discovered is that the type of changes that you tend to make as code evolves tend to break a constant percentag…

I think I agree with everything Joel said in that post. These crazy rules people come up with for "proper object oriented" programming remind me of extreme religious rituals. You have to observe all these stupid little rules or else your code will become impure you and will spend an eternity in code maintenance hell. I'll make a somewhat heretical claim even: Unit test are 20% useful engineering, and 80% fad. They ar…

> These crazy rules people come up with for "proper object oriented" programming remind me of extreme religious rituals. You have to observe all these stupid little rules or else your code will become impure you and will spend an eternity in code maintenance hell.

What's even more amusing is that the people prescribing these rules aren't even using languages where OO is implemented properly. I will start listening when they start using Common Lisp or Smalltalk for their examples. When they use C++ or Java, it just makes me giggle.

Re: "Joel Spolksy is wrong about my work" - Kent Beck

#39

Post by gaius »

lacker wrote: post #4

Here's a transcript of the podcast I believe Kent is referring to. Judge for yourself whether Joel "makes comments that make clear his lack of knowledge". http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/01/31.html I'd like to see Kent respond to Joel's specific points. E.g: The real problem with unit tests as I've discovered is that the type of changes that you tend to make as code evolves tend to break a constant percentag…

In most cases people who think they want unit tests really wanted to stay awake in CS101 where they'd have learnt about referential transparency and composability.

Re: "Joel Spolksy is wrong about my work" - Kent Beck

#40

Post by jwr »

I found Joel Spolsky's opinions to be all over the spectrum. Sometimes he posts well-researched pieces with intriguing conclusions. Sometimes he writes uninformed rants, which show his lack of understanding of the subject matter.

This is not a problem if you carefully apply your own measure to whatever he writes.

Post reply on HN