TITLE: Change The Battle From Arguments To Tests AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: March 11, 2014 4:52 PM DESC: ----- BODY: In his recent article on the future of the news business, Marc Andreessen has a great passage in his section on ways for the journalism industry to move forward:

Experimentation: You may not have all the right answers up front, but running many experiments changes the battle for the right way forward from arguments to tests. You get data, which leads to correctness and ultimately finding the right answers.

I love that clause: "running many experiments changes the battle for the right way forward from arguments to tests". While programming, it's easy to get caught up in what we know about the code we have just written and assume that this somehow empowers us to declare sweeping truths about what to do next. When students are first learning to program, they often fall into this trap -- despite the fact that they don't know much at all. From other courses, though, they are used to thinking for a bit, drawing some conclusions, and then expressing strongly-held opinions. Why not do it with their code, too? No matter who we are, whenever we do this, sometimes we are right, and sometimes, we are wrong. Why leave it to chance? Run a simple little experiment. Write a snippet of code that implements our idea, and run it. See what happens. Programs let us test our ideas, even the ideas we have about the program we are writing. Why settle for abstract assertions when we can do better? In the end, even well-reasoned assertions are so much hot air. I learned this from Ward Cunningham: It's all talk until the tests run. -----