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Comment by sydd | Hacker News Reader

What's going on with all the Uncle Bob hate nowadays? I last heard about him ~6-8 years ago when people were preaching his sentiments about clean code and TDD.

I agree with some of his stuff, e.g. he was the one who convinced me how important tests are.

Also the blog author is exaggerating in lots of places e.g.: "Safer Languages: The ‘Dark Path’." In the linked article he says "It’s not the fact that Swift and Kotlin are statically typed that has me concerned. Rather, it is the depth of that static typing." (I myself don't agree with Uncle Bob, I think nullable types are an awesome thing)

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I think it's partially that he reminds me of a motivational speaker that end of the day just ends up saying things that are incredibly simplistic and not really useful. His message is basically "unit tests are good!", and it's like, cool, got anything else? Youre famous for this? I also think the "uncle" thing comes across painfully pretentious. I'm 35, if you're not actually my uncle I'm sure not calling you that.

> unit tests are good

Well I sure wish more people would get the damned message - maybe if enough people listened he wouldn’t have to keep saying it.

Funny paradox though: if they were that useful he probably wouldn't need to say it all the time :) (To be clear I'm not anti-unit test, they're fine, but they're a very small part of a much larger picture)

> I also think the "uncle" thing comes across painfully pretentious. I'm 35, if you're not actually my uncle I'm sure not calling you that.

It's a well known idiom:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob's_your_uncle

You might not think it's funny but it seems a lot of people so.

Also: if anyone gets annoyed by it then for a lot of people that seems to make it even funnier.

Just saying.

Awesome - thank you. I had no idea. I suppose there are a lot of sayings like that in different languages. Which does not make much sense unless you know that language.

I think it's just really dated and comes across weird.

Hah fair enough I had no idea! Today I learned.

I think that is a different idom.

The sense of "Uncle" in Uncle Bob is someone that is older than you and may or may not know more than you do, but is authoritarian about it.

He's been really active lately pushing his methods and insulting people who don't agree with him. He's also thrown a few tantrums over the last year or so that gotten him more negative attention.

That was the way, once upon a time.

I really like his stuff, I disagree with him a lot, good. I cannot be bothered with people I agree with all the time, boring

There's a difference between engaging people in conversation over disagreements and flat out insulting people. Grown men throwing temper tantrums is never pleasant and should not be encouraged, and to be honest it was never "the way" for most people.

I agree with you, really.

I do like his style, but not because it is a good style, or should be emulated. But because it is entertaining, and is getting rare (among people worth listening too, anyways)

By "the way" I mean the alpha males of days gone by who were so certain of their correctness that... they acted like Uncle Bob

Big Swinging Dicks

Not really a rare thing among programmers, see Linus Torvalds :)

For one thing, on Stack Overflow there's a steady drumbeat of replies and comments that take Martin's writings and aphorisms as being the alpha and omega of software quality.

Martin has a lot of good advice (along with some dubious attitudes) for someone relatively new to programming, but he most definitely does not have the last word on the issue.

Wait, why do you consider this article "hate"? It gives many examples of supposedly bad advice and makes a point to say they are wrong.

I just wanted to point out that this article is from 2017, so it’s definitely not part of some sort of recent hate fest.

Edit: The title should probably include the “(2017)” tag.

> What's going on with all the Uncle Bob hate nowadays?

Sensible people have always hated him and his bullshit - what products has he ever produced? I remember when he started posting his nonsense on Stack Overflow - boy, did he run out of there with his tail between his legs.

Really? Is that you criteria for whether someone knows something worthwhile about programming? What did Stroustrup create? How about Dijsktra? Tannenbaun? Herb Sutter? There is more than one way to contribute to the advancement of the state of the art and Martin has done plenty to advance it.

> What did Stroustrup create?

Are you serious?

Maybe C++ could be considered a product, but that did not seem to be what the OP meant.

I'll take Knuth's ideas on goto over Dijsktra's any day, not just because Knuth has been the better thinker and writer, but also because he wrote TeX and other software.

Remember when structured programming was going to fix everything? Well, neither do I, but it still had a ton of momentum as a panacea when I was learning to program. Grown-ups with access to real computers would sniff at our BASIC machines and quote Djikstra at us.

Hm, I just checked the user page for an "Uncle Bob." It looks like he had 6 accepted answers out of a total of 10.

On all but one of the accepted answers a lot of the comments are simply kudos. Plus on most of his non-accepted answers, he has comments thanking him for his answer.

If I had judged StackOverflow by this user page alone, I would probably would have been persuaded to use StackOverflow. :)

Where's the "tail between his legs" post you are referring to?

https://stackoverflow.com/users/73476/uncle-bob

> Where's the "tail between his legs" post you are referring to?

I didn't mention a post. He came to stack overflow, posted a few answers for which he obviously expected instance acceptance, and then, once he realised that no-one particularly wanted anything to do with him, immediately disappeared.

I don't find evidence for the claim that he expected instant acceptance for any of the posts he made. What's your evidence for that claim?

I also don't find evidence that "no-one particularly wanted anything to do with him." Especially given that the majority of his answers were the accepted answer, why do you claim this?

Finally, what's the relevance of him "immediately" ceasing his posts? Users of crowd-sourced services have all kinds of usage patterns for all kinds of reasons. Frankly, I find fatuous to notice a sudden lack of use and jump to the conclusion that it must be due to the user having been humiliated or shamed (which is what "tail between legs" refers to).

I'm guessing they're referring to the fact that he only answered questions from March to October 2009. That's a short time, but we shouldn't really expect people to donate time answering questions on SO either.

TBF, I think a lot of us joined it in the early days, contributed a bit, found it not to our liking or that it wasn't where we wanted to spend a lot of time for some reason, and moved on. Someone moving on after a few, apparently, positive encounters doesn't really indicate anything other than that they moved on.

> Sensible people have always hated him

Sensible people should have a rather high bar for hating people.

> what products has he ever produced?

His impact hasn't so much been physical products as teaching.

He has taught a lot of useful stuff. For me there is one particular conference 12 or so years ago that I still thibk of again and again.

It is about refactoring methods and it was brilliant and by following the resulting code becomes much easier to reason about. Some reason needs ro be applied, but less than if I hadn't learned those ideas.

Please don't post personal invective like this to HN. Maybe you don't owe $UNCLE any better, but you owe this community better if you're posting to it, because the global effect of this kind of thing is destructive of what we want HN to be.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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