@sanityinc @defuneste Yeah, I was active in both the Clojure and TDD worlds at the time, and it was clear Hickey was talking about a different kind of testing than I was doing. The kind I’d been doing in the ‘80s, where testing was not used as a tool for thinking about a problem or the design of a solution.

I had roughly the same attitude as Hickey until I sat down and used TDD on a serious project. I don’t know if he ever has. I’ve been out of Clojure for over a decade (!)

@sanityinc @defuneste It’s sort of an interesting meta-commentary. Both of us thought we could discard a methodology by reasoning about it rather than trying it. I was lucky that @RonJeffries argued me into giving it a try.

Part of a career of reasoned-through conclusions that didn’t stand up against experience. Eventually I figured out that maybe I’m not smart enough to get it right by sustained cogitation, so I needed to adopt an approach more driven by rapid feedback from the world.