Unknown Environments

Tags: , , , , , , , Posted 2008-04-26 19:23 2 Comments

Here’s Knuth in an interview:

As to your real ques­tion, the idea of imme­di­ate com­pi­la­tion and “unit tests” appeals to me only rarely, when I’m feel­ing my way in a totally unknown envi­ron­ment and need feed­back about what works and what doesn’t…

Hmm, peo­ple who are “feel­ing their way in a totally unknown envi­ron­ment”… Like new con­trib­u­tors to an open-source project or a new employee doing main­te­nance work on a project after the orig­i­nal team has gone on to other companies.

…oth­er­wise, lots of time is wasted on activ­i­ties that I sim­ply never need to per­form or even think about. Nothing needs to be “mocked up.”

Good for him. Here on Planet Earth, devel­op­ers are often asked to work on projects they didn’t design and imple­ment them­selves, and do so in a way that doesn’t hor­ri­bly break some­thing that already exists. Or work with oth­ers because your desired end­state and time­line are not such that you can do it your­self or work things piece­meal and take it back for a redesign. </snark>

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  • Snark says:
    2008-04-27 at 2:14 am

    Why did you end your post with a “snark” ? I find it mildly offensive!

  • Lukas says:
    2008-04-27 at 4:52 am

    He is a sci­en­tist. Read the rest of the inter­view about how he approaches prob­lems. If every devel­oper had the time and guts to approach prob­lems this way (and the wage, of course), there’d really be no need for unittests. I use them any­way, as I rarely know my envi­ron­ment as well as he does because nobody pays me for know­ing, peo­ple pay me for mak­ing stuff work, and that’s unfor­tu­nately the way our sys­tem works.

    Other than that, I find unit tests are fun. And I love read­ing what Mr. Knuth writes, because he’s in my opin­ion one of the most bril­liant men around. If I were as bril­liant as him, I’d still use fvwm, too ;)

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