Top all-time · #3678
Ron Jeffries
Personal blog · xprogramming.com/articlesprogrammingcareer
Ron Jeffries writes ronjeffries.com, a personal blog at xprogramming.com about programming and career. Since 2007, 20 different Hacker News readers have linked it 33 times, most often “We Tried Baseball and It Didn’t Work (2006)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-22, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (10) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Ron Jeffries's site for writing on agile, XP and TDD, especially his failed Sudoku TDD attempt, which commenters cite as a classic example in debates about test-driven development.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 10 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /articles/oksudoku/4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2011-07-15
- We Tried Baseball and It Didn’t Work (2006)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-01-17
What Hacker News says?
Another avenue for learning is to start from hard problems. A hard problem is a problem that is very hard without using a known technique or solution. Somebody who's unfamiliar with it has no clue on how to even start solving it. Solving such a problem will add new techniques to your tool-belt for solving a whole class of problems. Problems that I've found worth studying: - Parsing. This is hard if you don't know th…
Comment linking /articles/oksudoku/
on “Programming languages worth checking out”Submitted We Tried Baseball and It Didn't Work as a story · 29 points
HN discussionIn some ways at least, you can look at data science / ML work as an extreme form of TDD and closer to it in spirit than most proselytizing I've come across. In another great example, Peter Norvig does way more TDD for his Sudoku solver [1] than a "textbook" attempt at it [2] ..like many orders of magnitude more testing when counting cases. The spirit is better if we try to answer the questions of "what do you know a…
Comment linking /articles/oksudoku/
on “I wrote a free book about TDD and clean architecture in Python”Submitted We Tried Baseball and It Didn’t Work (2006) as a story · 28 points
HN discussionThis is certainly a good counterpoint to the highly visible silicon valley status quo, but it's risky. Deep thinking might be the solution to a given problem, on the other hand it might give you insight a lot slower than iterating on a prototype. One of the benefits of computers is that experimentation is easier and cheaper than most other technical disciplines, so it's good to be able to whip up some experiments to…
Comment linking /xpmag/OkSudoku
on “Systems Programmers Relax - Most Programming Advice Isn't For You ”Submitted What is Scrum? as a story · 8 points
HN discussionRequired reading: “We tried Baseball and it didn’t work.” http://xprogramming.com/articles/jatbaseball/
Comment linking /articles/jatbaseball/
on “Warning Signs that Agile Is Declining”Submitted Back to Waterfall Isn’t Quite the Right Answer as a story · 8 points
HN discussionThe exact Sudoku URLs mentioned in the article, just checked/updated: Ravi's article: http://ravimohan.blogspot.com/2007/04/learning-from-sudoku-s... Peter Norvig's solver: http://norvig.com/sudoku.html Ron Jeffries' attempts: http://xprogramming.com/articles/sudokumusings/ http://xprogramming.com/articles/oksudoku/ http://xprogramming.com/articles/sudoku2 http://xprogramming.com/articles/sudoku4 http://xprogramming…
Comment linking /articles/roroncemore/
on “Where unit testing fails”Submitted We Tried Baseball and It Didn’t Work as a story · 4 points
HN discussionAn often touted "benefit" of TDD is that "addictive" feeling when you write tests and see them pass. "you feel like you have done a lot because you have a lot of code"; "you feel a great deal of accomplishment". Quite a few pages talk about it when you search for "tdd addictive". The canonical example is the master of XP solving Sudoku in the TDD way: http://xprogramming.com/articles/oksudoku/ (part 1 out of 5) -vs-…
Comment linking /articles/oksudoku/
on “Test-Driven Development Bypasses Your Brain”Submitted Refactoring – Not on the backlog as a story · 4 points
HN discussionDiscussions about TDD always make me think of Ron Jeffries' attempt to develop a sudoku-solver using TDD. That attempt is discussed in Ravi's article: http://ravimohan.blogspot.com/2007/04/learning-from-sudoku-s... Peter Norvig wrote a sudoku solver, not by using TDD, but using old-fashioned engineering: http://norvig.com/sudoku.html Ron Jeffries' attempts: http://xprogramming.com/articles/sudokumusings/ http://xpro…
Comment linking /articles/roroncemore/
on “Test Driven Development? You've got to be kidding me...”Submitted Deliver working software frequently as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThis isn't really a new thing though, is it. There is the (in)famous example of Ron Jeffries trying to solve Sudoku through TDD (and failing miserably). http://xprogramming.com/articles/oksudoku/ Compare and contrast his impotent flailing with Peter Norvig's masterful approach. http://norvig.com/sudoku.html Of course for the lulz you had people like Spolsky and Martin all use it to set out their view of software eng…
Comment linking /articles/oksudoku/
on “Where TDD Fails”Submitted Clean Code: Too Much of a Good Thing? as a story · 4 points
HN discussion" I know there are people who build incredible things out of monads, or inventing monadic metatypes I'm unable to grasp, and generally doing stuff never done before. But that is merely a sign of great cleverness of these people; One could, I suppose, say that it's like a treadmill with wheels that are connected to the running belt but slightly downgeared: you can use it to move on a street by exercising walking with…
Comment linking /xpmag/dbchaskellbowling/
on “Haskell IO for Imperative Programmers”Submitted Test everything but accessors as a story · 1 points
HN discussionOne is also supposed to never change the test after it has been etched in stone, especially in BDD, but good luck getting people to follow that rule, especially in this modern age of Agileish development cycles. TDD, if practiced exactly as originally described, ends up being a drain on resources. You care more about the tests than about the code being tested. As a now-classic example, observe a TDD master strugglin…
Comment linking /articles/oksudoku/
on “TDD is horrible while learning a new language”Submitted MMF? Minimum is smaller than you think as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThey need to come up with a new metric. LOC is so wrong for so many reasons. Running tested features seems like a good way to measure project progress but I don't know how it would relate to overall project complexity. http://www.xprogramming.com/Blog/Page.aspx?display=RunningTe...
Comment linking /Blog/Page.aspx?display=RunningTestedFeatures
on “How big is a Million Lines of Code?”Submitted Big Visible Charts as a story · 1 points
HN discussionOP here, I learned a lot from asking this question. Specifically that the Deadlines I have seen fail, were not due to Agile, but failure to implement Agile. Agile takes buy in both from the Customer, managers and dev team. This also takes education on roles and expectations. Without buy-in, you lose the check's and balances and end up with dev teams on a death march, or product deliveries not providing value for the…
Comment linking /articles/jatmakingthedate/
on “Are Deadlines Agile?”
