This is a good article, with (for me anyway) quite a twist at the end.
The author quotes a tweet expressing amazement that any company might not use TDD, 20 years after it was first popularised - and then writes
"I’d equate it to shell scripting. I spent a lot of time this spring learning shell scripting"
Wow! I feel like the person in the tweet. It's amazing to me that someone could be in a position to write an article with such solid development background without having had shell scripting in their everyday toolbox.
(I use TDD some of the time - I was slow to pick it up and a lot of my older code would have been much better if I had appreciated it back then. I like it very much when I don't really know how the algorithm is going to work yet, or what a good API looks like.)
You can use a "real" programming language for anything more complicated than running a program with some parameters. Really, the only thing the various Shell variants have going for them is that you can type it directly into the console. For any lightly complicated programming task they are abysmal languages.
Quite right! But approximate experiments and lightweight automation are really useful in deciding where to go and then making sure you stay there. I'm all for test-first, but I'd find it very hard to argue that it's a more important tool than, well, scripting things.
Shell scripting is just one option for scripting, some popular (and IMO better) options are Perl, Python and JavaScript.
I'm sure there are also people who use C for quick and dirty tasks. Seems weird, yes. But if that is the language you know best it may be the fastest in the short term.
The author quotes a tweet expressing amazement that any company might not use TDD, 20 years after it was first popularised - and then writes
"I’d equate it to shell scripting. I spent a lot of time this spring learning shell scripting"
Wow! I feel like the person in the tweet. It's amazing to me that someone could be in a position to write an article with such solid development background without having had shell scripting in their everyday toolbox.
(I use TDD some of the time - I was slow to pick it up and a lot of my older code would have been much better if I had appreciated it back then. I like it very much when I don't really know how the algorithm is going to work yet, or what a good API looks like.)