While this is true, DHH in his article largely dismissed not merely testing first, but unit tests altogether, explaining that he prefers to focused on system tests. This set the tone to many subsequent reactions.

But there's no reason to tie TDD and unit testing together. Many people who dislike TDD swear by unit tests and most of their testing code is unit tests. They merely prefer to think of TDD as a much too extreme form of unit testing that turns out to harm more than it helps.

From that point of view (which I share), DHH's rant is puzzling. It's like that meme with Michael Phelps' mom. He's against TDD! Yay! Down with unit-testing! Wait, what?

"Less emphasis on unit tests, because we're no longer doing test-first as a design practice, and more emphasis on, yes, slow, system tests." Huh? How does that follow? How about, let's not do test-first as a design practice, and _still_ retain emphasis on unit tests? Because they catch plenty of bugs, because they exercise more functionality than system tests will, because in dynamic languages they protect you from silly type errors, because they make refactoring merely unpleasant instead of a horror show...