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Comment by baash05 | Hacker News Reader

Clean code... To this day I cringe when I see methods/functions over 20 lines long.. Or when I see commented code blocks in one function..

Other have mentioned The Mythical Man Month, and I'd say it's a great book. Sadly, more often than not, it's something I wish I could staple to managements foreheads. "read this now before our next planning session"

The Rspec book was a great book, that helped me fully embrace TDD, and this has led to more sleep filled nights than I had a right to before its consumption.

1984... This one terrified me so much, that I have to include it. I write code much more securely because of it.

Strange in a Strange Land. If only because I learned what GROK means.

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> Clean code... To this day I cringe when I see methods/functions over 20 lines long.. Or when I see commented code blocks in one function..

To this day I cringe when I see dogmatic opinions of a fraud taken like an absolute truth.

Interesting. This is the first time I've seen Robert Martin to be referred to as a fraud. I'd like to read an elaboration of this.

I looked around and found this video [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mb9VPWbrqmE][Uncle Bob (Robert Martin) is a Fraud!!!]] but most of the comments are dismissive of the review.

The examples in Clean Code are bad and would never make it through modern code review.

qntm did an extensive overview of this: https://qntm.org/clean

Not a great video. He starts by attacking Robert Martin for taking 10 minutes to get to the substance of his talk, but then his own video never progresses from there and never gets to anything substantial.

>Interesting. This is the first time I've seen Robert Martin to be referred to as a fraud.

I'm not sure if fraud is quite the right word but he gets a lot of flak on HN for being something of a religious fanatic. E.g. the top comment in this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26153823

I was a fan for a while until I learned all this other stuff about him

https://blog.wesleyac.com/posts/robert-martin - this is a good article

> While Martin advocates for a small, dogmatic, and incorrect set of technical ideas for making code better, that's not why most people are upset with him — it's far more common for people to be upset about his views on race and gender, and particularly the way that someone in a position of power expressing those views hurts people in the communities that he's a part of

Clean Code was the first book I read that suggested (with concrete examples and rules!) that I should use code as a communication medium to other programmers first and foremost, the orders you give to the computer comes second. It is an opinionated book and there are some dumb rules in it but it did way more good than harm to the dev community. Definitely not a fraud...

"I read it there first" != "the idea came from there"

Uncle Bob puts forth a couple of good ideas from time to time, but none of those good ideas are his.

I never argued who thought about this idea first it's just where I met it. There is value in gathering good ideas. Could you please point me to the books about clean code before Uncle Bob? I'm interested.

> I cringe when I see methods/functions over 20 lines long

You may find this post interesting http://number-none.com/blow/john_carmack_on_inlined_code.htm...

>To this day I cringe when I see methods/functions over 20 lines long..

Wait until you have to follow dozens of 5 lines methods for the sake of unrequited abstraction that could have been compacted in an easier to read 30 line method.

> .. The Mythical Man Month, and I'd say it's a great book. Sadly, more often than not, it's something I wish I could staple to managements foreheads. "read this now before our next planning session"

Did you read the book? It's not about the (ab)use of mandays/months in planning sessions, it's about the huge differences in capacities between individual programmers and the importance of having some "10x programmers" in your team.

That’s a very opinionated view from someone who’s actually read the book.

I thought the whole thing was about having a plan, and many well structured, organised teams; having a 10x programmer makes no difference at all without the rest of the things; no matter how great you are, you can’t do everything, and if you try, you’ll become a bottleneck.

I sympathise very much with wanting to staple “do you actually have a plan for how that’s going to work?” to someone in a planning meeting.

> Very good professional programmers are ten times as productive as poor ones, at same training and two-year experience level. (Sackman, Grant, and Erickson)

> Sackman, Grant, and Erickson's data showed no correlation whatsoever between experience and performance. I doubt the universality of that result.

> A small sharp team is too slow for really big systems.

^ literally a quotes from the book.

There is a cost to indirection, a long function can often be way more understandable than a bunch of short, overly decomposed ones.

Why the dots?

I thought only boomers do this.

>1984... This one terrified me so much, that I have to include it. I write code much more securely because of it.

What book?

1984

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four

Your link seems to be broken?

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