Watching the discussion on the Ruby Rogues Parley about the difference between procs and lambdas I realized that, by being tightly coupled with the context they are created, procs could easily create memory leaks.

Duck typing is the “feature” that I currently like the most in Ruby, mainly because it makes it easier to create well-designed code - after all, you don’t need to worry about the type system: your focus is on the message you’re sending and the kind of role the object you’re interacting with can assume.

I may be wrong but TDD and testing in general aren’t as common in the C++ world as they are in Java or Ruby, and because of that and the fact that I already had TDD internalized, I’ve always found the process of learning C++ very hard. Besides that, for a beginner, having to deal with the language, different compilers, the compilation process and a crazy amount of boring gigantic books on the subject makes the journey of becoming a good C++ programmer very challenging. However, Jeff Langr published a beta version of his book “Modern C++ Programming with TDD” and with it he may be changing this perilous landscape!

In the last 2 years I worked at a company that fully embraced Test Driven Development (TDD) and automated testing in general. During that time no one around me questioned it: I had to create automated tests for every production code I wrote, and it had to be done preferably through TDD. The people from there even used to say that “code written without TDD isn’t a professional one”.

I must say that I disagree with the whole “TDD Is The Only True Way” story, but I thoroughly believe in something closely related: “production code without automated tests isn’t a professional one”.