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Comment by tincholio | Hacker News Reader

Well, I think Bob Martin promoting Clojure is a bad thing for Clojure... The Clojure community is really awesome, and so is the language, there's no need to have a self-declared (and under-substantiated) guru promoting it. I don't particularly care which languages other people use, but I do care about the ones I use (and, in my case, Clojure is the first one I reach for unless I have very specific requirements that would prevent me from doing so).

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Under-substantiated?! The guy was one of the signers of the original Agile Manifesto, and think what you will about big-A "Agile", the manifesto itself was a revolution in our industry, It may not seem that way now, but only because of how thourgly the ideas of the manifesto have been integrated into our culture. Then he wrote his whole Clean Code series which are generally considered necessary reading for any junior developer. Then after that he's basically been the senior dev at 8th light, which is both a highly successful consultancy and an excellent example of a company creating a structured mentorship program for new developers.

So yeah, feel free to disagree with Uncle Bob, but in no way is he "under-substantiated.

> the manifesto itself was a revolution in our industry

Am I allowed the opinion that it was bad for the industry, and some of the ideas it integrated are harmful and still holding us back as an industry?

It's convenient that we have no crystal ball into a parallel universe where agile never became popular.

Of course your allowed that opinion. But I would say we do have a crystal ball into the world where agile was not popular, and that was the world before agile. And that world was full of over engineered systems that did not solve the users' real problems.

Part of how you feel about agile likely has to do with the industry you are in. If you're doing embedded systems for cars or medical devices, agile is absolutely trash. But for the very large world of consumer facing software, or even business software that isn't dealing with life-or-death situations, the agile world is so much better than the waterfall world.

If more user engagement is the key, the agile philosophy would be a sentence rather than a manifesto.

Instead it was a bunch of vague maxims, that became a cult collection of heuristics (nominally rooted in Java, as much as it claimed to be polyglot).

The counter-argument to this is "No True Agiles-man", so the brand never needs to take responsibility for the reality, and this defense is as much a part of the culture as anything. It's like agile is a religion, and the manifesto is the religious texts - selectively ignored or interpreted as needed. No, I don't feel this is much better than waterfall, especially as even that could have evolved into more user engagement, without the mantras ("waterfall is bad" itself being a mantra) - why can't waterfall be a "tool in the belt", or a reasoned stage in the process? Why can't agile principles be taken individually rather than adamant on the whole? Why can't sometimes people be more important that process, and sometimes process more important than people? Why can't we have a plan (moreso upfront), and still respond to change?

I'd add: It's not easy to speak up in a forum where a significant % of members receive paychecks dependant on praising agile.

> agile never became popular

I don't know, I think we did: what is called "agile" today is all of the exact same stuff that the agile manifesto was explicitly the opposite of. Agile became popular among developers, managers didn't really understand what it was, consultants rebranded it to be exactly what it was supposed to be a replacement for, managers were happy, and developers went back to being frustrated.

Let's not get too carried away ripping on Bob. Clean Code is the "Wealth of Nations" of software engineering. Lots of pages of examples and discussion somewhat steeped in the time but nevertheless containing a sentence or two that make everything click and cements an inevitable and pervasive set of core ideas on the subject.

I wish we could bring ourselves to value writing code that is accessible instead of conjuring up gibberish that reads like a pretentious scientific journal. Uncle Bob has literally been saying that we should write code that anyone can understand easily. Hardly a radical elitist concept.

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