This is completely right. People read about design patterns or DRY, usually apply them wrong since they're still learning... and then act like it's the source materials fault?
Also have u seen refactors in clean code?
Guy refactors thread safe code by introducing static variables which make code not thread safe, but hey! At least it is a little bit shorter!
The best part is that the same commit added unit tests so our coverage grew over the magic 80% bar, but of course unit tests don't usually test for race conditions.
This is actually a big reason for the popularity of the book, showing a "one true way".
And this carried on to followers of the style. Some linters even enforce the style without much regard for the practicality of it.
That's Clean Code.
> Many of the recommendations in this book are controversial. You will probably not agree with all of them. You might violently disagree with some of them. That’s fine. We can’t claim final authority. On the other hand, the recommendations in this book are things that we have thought long and hard about. We have learned them through decades of experience and repeated trial and error. So whether you agree or disagree, it would be a shame if you did not see, and respect, our point of view.
It's been a while since I've read Clean Code, but I seem to recall it stated many times that blindly applying the rules of Clean Code without good justification would lead to bad code. The author even provides examples of this. People in this thread are criticising Clean Code principles as if they are meant to be a rigidly enforced dogma. They aren't, and the author never intended them to be so.
To a beginner, it reads like ”these are subjective matters so experience is king, and we have more experience than you do”.
And yet, that's clearly their target audience.
I personally derived a lot of value from reading the book, and I feel like my skills noticably improved from before to after. So perhaps my own biases are showing, but I believe discounting the book's contents wholesale is a mistake. There is a lot of value to be garnered from reading it. The book doesn't have to be the infallible word of the Software Gods for it to be useful.
That disclaimer filters out anybody that isn't at least on the transition to be a senior dev (with real seniority, not just in inflated title). It takes quite a lot of experience to agree or disagree with a rule, and respect a point of view without automatically applying it.
In fact, since the rules on the book have way deeper impact than they look like, being able to read that book and not getting damaged by it is a good test for seniority.
But, funny thing, if you are mature enough to fit the disclaimer, you've necessarily already seen all that the book talks about and don't need reading it.
With practice, one soon comes to understand why you might also want to solve for Y. Those with experience are going to ignore what everyone else says anyway, so it doesn't matter if it is not true for them.
Indeed, we in this industry are bad at practicing, and that's a problem. Imagine being Taylor Swift and having your guitarist for the night's performance having picked up a guitar for the first time yesterday. That would never fly, yet that's often how we treat software development – and that's how we get to these kinds of places.