> “Well, I’m going to do Sudoku and I’m going to have this class and first thing I’m going to do is write a bunch of tests.” But then he never got anywhere

There's a blog post I read once and that I've since been unable to locate anywhere, even with AI deep research. It was a blow-by-blow record of an attempt to build a simple game --- checkers, maybe? I can't recall --- using pure and dogmatic test driven development. No changes at all without tests first. It was a disaster, and a hilarious one at that.

Ring a bell for anyone?

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moron4hire 4 days ago | parent [-]

Norvig mentions it in the article linked in the post to which you are replying. The game was Sudoku. The person was Ron Jeffries. https://ronjeffries.com/articles/-z022/01121/sudoku-again/

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quotemstr 3 days ago | parent [-]

Thanks!

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fifilura 3 days ago | parent [-]

To be fair, I'd like to be forgiven for anything I did in 2006.

It is a story that reads like a fairy tale, but it is time to give the guy a break.

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moron4hire 2 days ago | parent [-]

That's why I linked to Jeffries' post where he gave more context.

Though, in this particular case, he then went on to go back down the TDD Sudoku rabbit hole and, though he does seem to eventually write a program that works, the path to get there involved reading existing solutions and seems rather drain circly, which makes his post I linked seem a bit like making excuses. IDK. I don't really care beyond mild bemusement.

	▲	fifilura a day ago \| parent [-]
		Haha, he really continued digging himself into the hole, i see it now. "I’ve found some Python code for Sudoku techniques. I do not like it. But it’ll be useful, I reckon, even though we aren’t likely to copy it."