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+-   Donald Knuth Rips on Unit Tests & Multicore Ch-> on Saturday April 26 2008, @10:01AM eldavojohn

Submitted by eldavojohn on Saturday April 26 2008, @10:01AM
programming
eldavojohn writes "You may be familiar with Donald Knuth from his famous "Art of Programming" books but he's also the father of TeX and, arguably, one of the founders of open source. There's an interesting interview where he says a lot of stuff I wouldn't have predicted. One of the first surprises to me was that he didn't seem to be a huge proponent of unit tests. I use JUnit to test parts of my projects maybe 200 times a day but Knuth calls that kind of practice a "waste of time" and claims "nothing needs to be 'mocked up.'" He also states that methods to write software to take advantage of parallel programming hardware (like multi-core systems that we've discussed) are too difficult for him to tackle due to ever changing hardware. He even goes so far as to vent about his unhappiness toward chipmakers for forcing us into the multicore realm. He pitches his idea of "literate programming" which I must admit I've never heard of but find it intriguing. At the end, he even remarks on his adage that young people shouldn't do things just because they're trendy. Whether you love him or hate him, he sure has some interesting/flaimbait things to say."
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