I did not knew him. But as far as I can see it looks like the David Heinemeier Hansson "TDD is Dead". Basically someone talking against an approach that never have really tried. Because what he says is the opposite of what happens. In fact, if it was true what he said, science would not work.

As far I can see Leslie Lamport's comes from the math background. It says that he is inventor of TLA+ Specification Method based on State Machines. I have some experience with those, and they are very effective to model and create very safe code for small, but very critical, software. I have used a little bit in industrial applications, but beyond that, the complexity grows too much and makes and it becomes unusable.

Yet math and science are different. In math work by deduction: you get a logic predicate and you can work with it until you get a perfect working program. But in science you do experiments (aka tests) to verify that you theory is true. It turns out that most of universities have tones of courses around those precious maths, but almost no busines use it. The reality is that it is too complex, and often, the formalization of the problem is several orders of magnitude more complicated than simply coding it. That is why, although since Dijkstra and the structured programming we can mathematical proof that every program works, it does not worth it. All that we have left is just coding, or improve it with tests and science.

So, you caught me, not every TDD detractor makes that mistake. In this case he did not even tried, he dismised it completely just based in academic theory about a notion of perfection that it is not practical in the real world. So... I should change from every detractor, to almost every detractor. But... the subtilte is still right: "Don't dismiss TDD before you try Agile-Unit Testing".

Thanks Stefan, it helped me to revisit some old times in which everything was smaller and simplier :_)

PD I bet that in his manual about how to use LaTeX he provided a lot of examples XD , found! Bingo It is not the same, but, if math is so perfect to express the intention and understand the consequences of what you are doing, why not use it in the manual? It is not like the users of LaTeX are undergraduated, often it is the tool for writing papers. Science people able to understand complex models. So, even when he says one thing, in the practical world, when the stakes are in play, and he do not work alone and need to communicate with other people, then he brings examples :D

It was funny ^_^ Thanks!!!