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Comment by icholy | Hacker News Reader

Has uncle Bob actually produced any useful software? Are there any examples of his work out there which can be analysed?

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He’s got a GitHub. This seems to be the most notable thing: https://github.com/unclebob/fitnessedotorg

Seems like this only includes the compiled class files and no actual source?

You’re right. The source is at https://github.com/unclebob/fitnesse

His career IIRC starts in the 70s. After 50 years, the answer is assuredly yes to the first question.

It is absolutely possible to code terribly for 50 years and get away with it. Experience is no proof of anything.

Maybe, but that was not the question. I think that perspective is lacking context as well. Programming has generally gotten better over the last 50 years. It is not a dichotomy of just good code vs bad. Most code is bad, has been bad, and before that was even worse.

One could almost view Clean Code as a response to Java Swing - a potential case study of bad API design. I personally greatly appreciate the new focus Clean Code put on API design that was lacking beforehand.

Yeah, I get the impression that he just sells his image as some "guru" of software engineering, and that he doesn't actually deal with or write much real life code.

I think the aspirations of the agile manifesto are great, but basically everyone involved in it was an enterprise software methodology consultant. I forget who the exception was; someone will remind me.

People can give good insight about things despite even not creating these things, see e.g. physicists who study atoms

It’s more like someone who gives talks about smashing atoms to study subatomic particles without ever having been to a particle accelerator facility.

You can’t replace experience. There’s theory, then there’s practice. Ideas are worthless until tested in reality.

Oh I think there are plenty experiences out there practicing various strategies of clean code in the wild which he can observe without creating them himself

You really have to experience it yourself to see how the strategies you come up with affect debugging and changing the code when fixing bugs or adapting to new requirements.

Things like strictly requiring 4 or less lines per function leads to huge a mess that is very hard to untangle and work with, or even understand for newcomers.

Isn’t that the same case for Robert Martin? I’m not going to be the one defending Uncle Bob, but most of the people out there giving advice about “clean code/architecture” come from the consulting world without any work that can be analysed.

Those are the same person

I always confuse them. I meant Martin Fowler.

I am rather ignorant of the world of consulting. If someone like Uncle Bob consults a company and the company implement his ideas with his guidance, then is a consultant like Uncle Bob typical gone by the time maintenance rolls around?

I ask because I can see his ideas being great to him if he is never around for damage control because what feedback does he truly have that cannot be fought back with some 'Get out jail free' card like "The company deviated from my plan after I left!"

Either that or the company hires yet another consultant to rewrite everything because it can't be maintained.

Clean code had a place and context, it is almost two decades old. The idea of writing usable API's at the time was somewhat novel. Most developers were busy trying to get the code to work at all, that the API was an afterthought. EG: Methods with 3 string variables followed by 4 boolean was not unheard of.

Since clean code was written, the two decades since, a number of values are more salient and some novel. Ideas like Single-abstract-method, functional programming, immutable state.

Hence, the damage that was being fixed is a swap of convoluted, extremely stateful APIs- to cleaner looking ones, that were more usable, less stateful. (Albeit, Still damaged by modern standards)

Things have come along even further since.

The ideas in clean code are many, have a context, and were certainly not the final step for programming - which is effectively brand new to humanity. For example, I've been learning to sew recently. Everything I have been learning, except the actual sewing machine, has been known for a couple hundred to couple ten thousand years already. Zero is new. Contrasted to programming, where the first programs are still in living memory - it's a crazy different and new field of knowledge, it is YOUNG.

Knowing the context of what was before 2000 imo is critical to contextualize the many ideas in clean code.

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