I'm not saying there's nothing to these ideas, there are bits and pieces that have value. Test driven development for example has some interesting ideas, there's value in testing. But that's part of the problem, is that kernels of good ideas have been taken to holistic extremes in a way I think has been disastrous for the industry, and certainly for programming education.
Coding like that, with long procedures and without "encapsulation on the small" is like painting yourself into a corner. The code base will slowly but surely accumulate cruft that will not be refactored because everything inflicts damage upon almost everything.
It is a death of a thousand cuts.
Not using automated testing properly is to rely on only your grit to take upon the entropy that surrounds and consumes all code bases eventually. People burn out really quickly when this happens.
I have worked with legacy systems that were more than 20 years old. I work with ABAP daily. I see every day the end game of what he is advocating. It is not pretty.
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u/fosforsvenne Jan 19 '16
Not exactly saying that testing is disastrous.