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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

When I hear "Kent Beck" I reach for my gun.

I don't have a problem with "Kent Beck" as an individual but more than anyone else in software "Kent Beck" is a brand like "Anthony Robbins". I care what you think but not what you think "Kent Beck" thinks.

For that matter the same thing is going on with Martin Fowler, who is using his software craftsmanship cred to legitimize a shop that ships work to the third world and turns programming from a white collar to a blue collar profession. There is no topic you could pick better if you wanted to have a clickbait discussion war over software.

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> Martin Fowler, who is using his software craftsmanship cred to legitimize a shop that ships work to the third world and turns programming from a white collar to a blue collar profession.

Can you expand on that, or point out resources describing this phenomenon? Not as proof, but to explain to me what you're getting at. I hold the ThoughWork-ers I know in high regard, so I feel personally challenged in a bunch of ways by your point and worry I've missed something.

I laughed at this, and I agree that almost any sort of appeal to authority should be derided as the cheap trick it probably is. That said, Kent Beck says a lot of smart stuff in his books, and I don't think you should stop listening just because his name comes up.

It is the level of indirection about the problem.

Kent Beck said something good about problem A.

Now somebody else is talking about "Kent Beck said something good about problem A" and there is the risk that "Kent Beck said so" outweighs the "something good about problem A".

Baudrillard writes about this phenomenon about the "precession of simulacra", which gets you roughly to the place Girard warns about -- Baudrillard reminds that there was something else in the past, Girard wouldn't care.

Steven Hawking said some absurd things about black holes in the 1970s that essentially postulated no quantum gravity (e.g. the propagator is not unitary and operators being unitary is almost the only thing you need to do quantum mechanics) I think the "cult of personality" held back work in QG for at least two decades, it wasn't until some brave people tried to calculate things with radically different methods and realized they were getting the same results and not by accident that the "information loss" concept is absurd, as is the classical picture of a black hole interior.

> turns programming from a white collar to a blue collar profession

why would that be a bad thing?

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24281805.

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