The real "problems" with TDD are

(a) in the "driven" part, not the "test" part. Tests are (in general) a good thing. However, using a series of tests to drive your design (aka "TDD is not a testing method,it is a design method" idea) often gives you an illusion of progress as you hill climb using conformance to an increasing number of tests as a progress heuristic and end up on top of a local maximum (as for example in the TDD sudoku episode).

(b)in conflating TDD with one or more of (1) testing, (2) automated testing (3) automated regression test suites (4) developers adding more tests to the automated regression test suite as they develop more features, refactor, debug etc.

You can have (1) to (4) without either (5)writing tests first (aka "don't write a line of code without having written a test covering it") or (6)driving your design with tests. The last two ideas are the real distinguishing features of TDD and are of debatable merit. None of (1) through (4) are novel ideas. (5) and (6) are where differences of opinion happen.

Even if you choose to use TDD, it is good to be aware it is just one tool in your toolbox and not necessarily the default tool to reach for.

(c) in the zealotry of some of its evangelists who insist that TDD is some kind of moral imperative and is the only "correct" way of developing software and anyone who doesn't follow that path or make respectful obeisance to it is "unprofessional","dodgy" etc. This is often accompanied by conflating TDD with more generic notions like "automated tests" etc as above.

For example, Rich Hickey, the author of Clojure, said recently at the Strange Loop conference "We say, “I can make a change because I have tests.” Who does that? Who drives their car around banging into the guard rails!?"

(and that is all he said. One sentence in a keynote presentation)

For this Hickey was taken to task by a TDD advocate, Brian Marick, for not being "respectful" enough to TDD and for his "tone" in daring to mildly criticize it as a development practice. After some tweets complaining about Rich Hickey's tone driving away people from Clojure etc he wrote

http://www.exampler.com/blog/2011/09/29/my-clojure-problem

"The dodgy attitudes come from the Clojure core, especially Rich Hickey himself, I’m sad to say."

This kind of repeated whining and harassment over a few days made the normally unflappable Hickey (who asked for references to his "disrespect" etc, to the sound of crickets) lose his temper and say (on his twitter stream)

"If people get offended when their tools/methods are criticized as being inadequate for certain purposes, they need to relax.",

and "Testing is not a strawman. It's an activity, it has benefits, but is not a panacea. No 'community' should be threatened by that fact"

and later "Accusing people who merely disagree with you of being snarky, intolerant, dismissive etc is both wrong and destructive."

and much later after being subjected to a barrage of tweets criticizing his tone and 'lack of respect' for TDD, "If launching an ad hominem attack is the product of a lot of thought, it is time for you to move on. Good riddance."

postscript: the best criticism of TDD I've seen is at http://www.dalkescientific.com/writings/diary/archive/2009/1... . The responses at http://dalkescientific.blogspot.com/2009/12/problems-with-td... are (mildly) interesting as well.

That sound you hear is dumb money being lit on fire.

Suck it up, boys. Pay your taxes like the rest of us. You're sitting on huge war chests of cash. You can afford to contribute a little bit of that to the common good.

US companies in general are sitting on $2Trillion in cash. Productivity is sky high, because of all the lay offs across the economy, and profits are generally up across the board in most sectors of the economy.

US companies aren't spending because they don't want to spend. They aren't hiring because they are productive enough and are profitable enough without hiring. They are also scared because of all the uncertainty in the financial sector, not necessarily because of the high taxes.

The few people that are actually putting money to work in this economy are angel investors and VC's by giving small engineering teams small amounts of cash as well as leeway to experiment at building interesting products.

I was early at Palantir (employee #10). Trust me, the founders assumed way more risk than I did when I joined. I didn't even quite understand that fact until I myself started a company. If you know the Airbnb story, you'll know these guys worked their asses off on an idea nobody else believed in. As legend would have it, Joe had a binder of credit cards the way kids would have binders of baseball cards. Think about that sacrifice when you criticize their action today.

Incidentally, this is one of the best reasons to found a company -- equity is distributed in such a way that those who take the biggest risk will be properly rewarded.

Secondly, founders taking money off the table has become common. As mentioned in this very comment thread: "Zuckerberg, Moskovitz, and Parker each got $1m from Accel when they raised their $12.7m Series A according to David Kirkpatrick's The Facebook Effect."

This is both at a far earlier stage, and far more money on percentage basis compared to the overall valuation of the company. I wasn't party to the deal, but I highly doubt any other early Facebookers got liquidity then. But those same people are definitely not complaining today.

I personally don't think anyone got screwed here.

And that's exactly the problem with the patent system.

They are solving the problem "we have a company and an app that was super hyped and we still have money to spend! And, uh, facebook"

The problem i have with something like his is that i really want a fantastic video streaming service, or the ability to post photos from my phone better (i have never been able to post a photo to G+ from the iphone app - it just hangs) and i will never have a Facebook account.

Color to me seems washed out. I cannot see them being anything too amazing because it is reliant on facebook and has this weird voyeur model.

They are trying to hard.

> If Facebook is "lying through its teeth" it will only hurt them in the long run.

Because after all, we see corporations being punished every day for lying by the powerful and effective consumer protection organizations in the United States.

You are mustering moral outrage over money that would in any other transaction go to the VC. For decades, VC have been transferring liquidity away from employees and to themselves.

There is something "new" here: the fact that founders have so much leverage in this market that they can claw that value back from investors.

The welfare of the "employees" is a total red herring. Venture capital investors have been fucking over employees directly for almost 20 years.

I would suspect that the number of North Americans who speak a second language is comparable to the number of Europeans who speak non-European languages.

For some reason this link is forwarding to http://127.0.0.1/2011/10/the-great-cul-de-sac-problem-and-ho.... Any clue why, or how to fix it?

First: This is really a review of Unity, not Ubuntu. The main ways that Ubuntu/Linux differ from OS X have nothing to do with the UI, but rather the underlying system.

That said, I'm glad to see that somebody likes Unity. Ubuntu's switch to Unity is one of the reasons that I left Ubuntu for another distro.

It seems like Canonical is targeting its product more towards people like the author of this post, in which case it seems that their strategy may be working.

In my recent research into nutrition, there is good evidence that saturated fat isn't the enemy.

The science for nutrition in humans is very difficult to pin down - there are just too many external variables, and the human body does a fantastic job in working with whatever it gets as a fuel in the short term that masks a lot of what is bad.

Personally, I'm convinced there's something that rings true in the Paleo movement, and I'm trying that out now to see how it works for me.