TDD is BS?

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Thu, 20 Jun 2013 10:04:54 -0700
"H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:
> 
> That's terrible. It encourages the kind of sloppy coding that makes so
> much "enterprise" code look nastier than what a highschool dropout
> writes in his sleep.
> 

I realize you're just using that as an illustrative example, but:

High schools are *specifically* and *deliberately* designed for
*average*-level students. The students who have trouble there are
both the low-intelligence *and* high-intelligence ones. This is a
*known*, documented fact. Virtually nobody accepts it though,
most likely because schools are (undeniably) sacred cows.

As for more direct experience, one of the smartest people I've ever
known was a high school drop-out. The majority of the *worst*
programmers (and just biggest dumbfucks in general) that I've ever met
happened to be grad students and graduate degree holders. Only *one* of
the worst programmers I've come across was self-taught (and IIRC, he
did still have at least a 4-year college degree).

There is *no* positive correlation between ability/intelligence and
academic achievement. I don't understand where so much of society
keeps getting that patently absurd notion. At best, it's a
zero-correlation. At worst, it may very well be a somewhat
negative-leaning correlation. (No offense to Andrei or others here -
obviously there's always exceptions, and being big long time D fans
kinda puts us all in the "outliers" boat anyway.)

I'd also point people to this:

"The results of a major national study revealed that much of the
regular curriculum is redundant for gifted students (Reis et al.,
1993). When as much as 60% of the curriculum was eliminated, gifted
students exceeded or equaled achievement levels of matched students who
were required to complete the regular curriculum. Although these
findings bode ill for bright students in general, consider the plight
of those who tend to be predisposed to seeking greater levels of
stimulation from the environment. They are automatically at odds with
the expectations schools have for students to be neat, docile, quiet
for extended periods, and interested in what the teacher is teaching."
--
http://www.sengifted.org/archives/articles/gifted-students-with-attention-deficits-fact-andor-fiction-or-can-we-see-the-forest-for-the-trees

The study referenced is this:

Reis, S. M., Westberg, K. L., Kulikowich, J., Caillard, F., Hébert, T.,
Plucker, J., Purcell, J. H., Rogers, J. B., & Smist, J. M. (1993). Why
not let high ability students start school in January? The curriculum
compacting study. (Research Monograph No. 93106). Storrs, CT: The
National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented. 

Which is available here:
http://www.gifted.uconn.edu/nrcgt/reports/rm93106/rm93106.pdf

And I can personally attest to the accuracy of that quoted paragraph
above, as I *lived* exactly what they describe during the majority of
that hellish K-12 cesspool of retards normally referred to as "school".
And of course, that's just one study, there's plenty of others that
all boil down to the same thing: Schools do NOT, in general, work for
intelligent students. Only the average ones.

(No different from the rest of society really: Only the first std
deviation is ever given a shit about, everyone else is expected to just
fuck off since their existence mucks up the corporate
profit-maximization spreadsheets - which is also why public stocks are
fucking evil, as it legally *mandates* that the corporation *must*
put financial profit far above *all* other concerns such as, you
know, not being an evil society-destroying sack of shit.)

Bottom line is, schools are absolute garbage, and academic
achievement is *at best* completely meaningless.