this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2024
600 points (98.1% liked)
Programmer Humor
32131 readers
1320 users here now
Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
Rules:
- Posts must be relevant to programming, programmers, or computer science.
- No NSFW content.
- Jokes must be in good taste. No hate speech, bigotry, etc.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm a programmer since the 80s, who is this guy?
He wrote for example the books Clean Code and Clean Architecture which are IMO opinion really good books although I don't agree with every point he makes.
Some really good points he makes are for example:
Those comes with examples. He's a tad bit overly idealistic in my opinion. These books fail to mention a couple of things:
All in all though, very solid books. I read Clean Code in university and Clean Architecture in my first job and it really helped me wrap my head around different ways to solve the same problem. Excellent ideas but it's not the holy truth. The only reason I remember all of these points is that I encountered all of them on the job and saw the benefit.
In my opinion new programmers should read it and take inspiration. Craftsman level developers should criticise and maybe pick up a few brain concepts to sort some concepts out in their brain. Experts will get little benefit though.
I generally agree with the idea that code should be as simple as it can be to accomplish the goal of the code… I just haven’t been convinced that Clean Code is the way to get there, necessarily. The book does contain some good advice , to be sure, but I wouldn’t call it universal by any means.
I also think TDD is a very optimistic strategy that just doesn’t match up with reality terribly often.
Actually, I think that’s what confuses me the most about all of Uncle Bob’s books. I’ve read a couple of them and thought, “All this sounds great but real world development just doesn’t seem to work that way.” Like, all of his advice is for best case scenarios that I certainly haven’t encountered in my career.
I say confusing, because surely he’s been in the profession long enough to have seen the disconnect between what he’s preaching and real life, right???
Yeah, I 100% agree. For small projects most of the principles don't matter as much because the complexity is just not there. For big projects you actually need to take a big ass tech debt loan to actually get things done on time and on budget.
The testing aspect I'm not as sold on either. I enjoy tests sometimes but they also come with increased development and maintenance cost. He emphasises unit tests but I've found that a few integration tests that use API calls to simulate a use case gets you most of the way there.
That being said I've seen raw HTML email string with hardcoded values in a 2000 line method that relies heavily on if statements. That one method probably breaks around 10 of his rules and I absolutely hate it. Very hard to add features to if you can imagine and incredibly noisy and hard to debug. Shouldn't be like that but it is. I wouldn't apply all of Bob's rules but I would refactor it into a service with clear boundaries so I don't have to deal with the function having "local globals" if you know what I'm getting at.