
Being a Developer After 40 - peacewise
https://medium.freecodecamp.com/being-a-developer-after-40-3c5dd112210c#.9p3o2i8na
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kazinator
> _Unit tests were unheard of [in 1997]_

Really, now.

The Unit Test wikipedia page cites as one of the external refs this:

 _IEEE Standard for Software Unit Testing: An American National Standard, ANSI
/IEEE Std 1008-1987_

The last four digits there refer to the year. I.e. Unit Testing had already
crawled into a standard and died ten years before 1997.

~~~
jghn
I didn't start my career until the late 90s but I never saw anyone write a
unit test until the XP craze started kicking off in the early aughts. Even
then it was a few more years before I saw it happen commonly.

~~~
kazinator
The fad of writing countless unit tests for every function, checking them in,
and running them feverishly all the time, is what is new.

Programmers have tested individual low-level functions before using them to
build higher level functions, since the dawn of programming.

Libraries with regression test suites existed long before TDD.

~~~
jghn
Sure, we had regression tests at my jobs back then but they were always
written and managed by QA groups. I never saw nor wrote any until a few years
later.

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contingencies
There is some OK stuff in here but there is also a lot of codswallop and it's
far too verbose, eg. make sure you learn Node, be sure to read this set of
books. "But everything old is new again, and ignore fads!" It's worse than
verbose and of dubious quality, it's internally inconsistent.

