Greg Wilson
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2021–2022
27:29 · 25K views · Jul 17, 2021
Greg Wilson surveys what empirical research actually shows about software development, why we believe it, and how to share that knowledge more widely. It covers evidence on practices such as TDD and design patterns.
HN people recommend it as an evidence-based counterweight to opinion in software engineering debates.
4 comments from Hacker News
There are quantitative studies showing that TDD has little to no impact development time or code quality[0]. What has been found, however, is that writing code in short increments helps a lot (something that can be caused by using TDD). For more information on studies covering the topic (and much more), I highly recommend watching Greg Wilson's Software Engineering's Greatest Hits[1]. [0]: [LINK] [1]: this video
That (or more likely this video since that's where the info is) would make a good HN submission in its own right. Probably best to wait a few days to let the hivemind caches clear (followup/copycat posts aren't great: [LINK] ). If you submit it, let us know at hn@ycombinator.com so we can put it in the second-chance pool ( [LINK] , explained at [LINK] ), so it will get a random placement on HN's front page.
> Most of the critics of waterfall haven't actually worked in such a project. I wouldn't say that's true. > Most of the critics of either C or javascript haven't actually built anything noteworthy with it. That's oddly out-of-place gatekeeping. I've built large things in C 25 years ago that didn't get finished or weren't put in production. That's enough to learn about C, at the time . > Most of the critics of OOP don't have much practical experience with it I wouldn't say that's true. I read a collection of thoughts that feels like a combination of imposter syndrome (20 applications in 20 years? yeesh, that's sparse) and blanket characterization through arbitrary gatekeeping. I understand what they are getting at. This sort of critique about software development practice critique was better covered in "What We Think We Know About Software Development and Why We Believe it’s True."[1] - [LINK] [1] About 18 months ~ 2yrs ago, all copies of this keynote were scrubbed from the internet as part of Greg Wilson capitalizing on his geek-fame with an Oreilly book and appearances. Recently, there has been an explosion of Greg Wilson videos on youtube. Not sure how long it will last. Similar information is presented in this updated, broad presentation that Greg Wilson put up: this video and there's a PDF and a dry, stale version of the keynote presentation that I can't find again.
There is some evidence that shows learning design patterns makes them developers better, which is a very specific finding - this video