But the end goal is not disciplined programmers! It is better, safer and more timely software.
Your argument applies just as well to safety equipment in cars and on heavy equipment, and you may be right that the reduced risk of being killed or maimed makes people more lax. But you can’t argue with the results: Far fewer people do in fact get killed or maimed!
Fewer errors get deployed to production code because programmers have a more rigorous discipline when creating software? Also yes.
Which part should a teacher like Uncle Bob (I consider him as such) should care more about? People using tools or processes, or having them care about the discipline enough?
I'll go with the latter. And if he seems dismissive about the former, is because he's trying to teach about discipline, which is far more difficult to teach, than to use a tool or follow some process.
And, yes, a teacher should care more about the skills than the tools, but Uncle Bob is actively against the tools, claiming that they impede learning the skills. Which is no more true than claiming that automatic transmissions or anti-spin in modern race cars impedes learning how to race.
And by the way, noone is making the argument that tools solve all the problems developers deal with. But to say that actually, they solve none of them, is foolish. Optionals, to take one example of something Uncle Bob is against, prevents a large proportion of what is probably the most common runtime error, namely dereferencing a null pointer. And yes, Uncle Bob is right that it comes at the small expense, which is having to think more carefully up front about your data and your abstractions, and there is no doubt he is right that some programmers will feel constrained and will find and use whatever mechanisms exist to bypass the safety that this feature offers. But in much the same way, there are also some people who feel constrained by seat belts, hard hats, helmets, dust masks etc. and choose not to wear them, yet you don’t find many people who would argue that this makes them pointless and generally a bad idea.
"I have nothing against tools like this. I’ve even contributed money to the Light Table project. I think that good software tools make it easier to write good software. However, tools are not the answer to the “Apocalypse”."
http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2017/10/04/CodeIsNotThe...