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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>