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Comment by omcnoe | Hacker News Reader

It's probably time to stop recommending Clean Code: https://qntm.org/clean

I don’t want to be a hater but a lot of “Uncle Bob’s” advice just doesn’t seem very good, this article included. Robert has had a long and successful career writing books on code style and architecture diagrams, but he hasn’t built anything notable in industry during that period. And the opinion presented here seems to clash with nearly everybody who has ever actually built a successful startup. Some things you have to learn by doing.

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While "Uncle Bob" certainly hasn't uncovered any silver bullets, I find the criticism of him to be generally unfair. It's the same type of criticism that commonly targets anyone that actually sticks their neck out far enough to make concrete recommendations.

So many teachers, careful not to invite the ire of the armchair critic and ACKCHYUALLY know-it-all, will hem and haw, leading you into analysis paralysis regarding "best practices". That then leads to exhortations to "find what works best for you", acknowledging there are many "right" ways among all the wrong ways.

As I've gotten older, I appreciate teachers like Uncle Bob who provide a specific prescription and says "try it this way". I've discovered I learn faster starting somewhere concrete.

> While "Uncle Bob" certainly hasn't uncovered any silver bullets

Which is compatible with Brooks, who famously had to point out that there are no Silver Bullets.

Anyone who is reading these kinds of things and expecting to find that the authors uncovered a Silver Bullet will be regularly disappointed. But that doesn't, as you point out, negate the value of the learned experience that they are trying to communicate. Even if there are no Silver Bullets, that doesn't mean that there are processes and methodologies that can make things more predictable, robust, reliable, and enjoyable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet

I think the problem I have with Bob is that he doesn’t say "try it this way". He says “you must do it this way, and if you don’t do it this way you are a disgrace to the profession”. Its obnoxious.

Even worse, his cultish followers who blindly believe everything he says without understanding it. “Why must it be done this way?” I ask. “Because Bob said so”. Without comprehension, his advice becomes toxic.

If you’re new and you simply don’t get it yet, that’s fine. If you think you’re now an all knowing being because you listen to Bob, please calm down.

All non-political critiques which I have seen (here and elsewhere) always seem to turn out to be based on misunderstandings or exaggerations of what he actually has said or written (sometimes wildly so). Or, as it sometimes turns out, people hate him not for anything he has said, but because of how other people has misunderstood and misinterpreted him.

From what I have seen, every time he has been criticized sincerely, and he has become aware of it, he has engaged his critics in open debate, and they have come to amicable results, with him sometimes altering his views.

What you describe is apparently a common impression of what he writes; I have seen many people express it. But I have not seen an actual quote to prove it. I think some people may feel so threatened by someone who says that what they do may not be very good, that cognitive dissonance kicks in and they instead elect to take offense at the tone of the message (and re-interpret what he says in the worst possible way in order for that to make sense).

From the linked article:

of course one of the disciplines I’m talking about is TDD. Anybody who thinks they can go faster by not writing tests is smoking some pretty serious shit

That is not some made up stuff - smoking shit - is literally saying one is a disgrace if he is not doing TDD.

I call your reading comprehension into question. What it literally says is that you will not go faster by not writing tests, or, conversely, that writing tests will not make you go slower, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is wrong. You are imagining an insult in order to feel outrage, probably so that you can then avoid the actual issue.

I read it as useless exaggeration used to incite the outrage.

It feels correct for young, starry eyed devs.

But then I have to deal with bunch of assholes in workplace who read that kind of shit and think they have to be edgy and always right and only “right things” have to be done.

That is the whole context you should read here and why people don’t like Bob’s stuff.

Other thing was Linus and his code reviews - I had at least couple of guys thinking they were Linus when what they worked on was yet another off the mill CRUD app. Good for Linus he finally understood what toxicity is and toned down.

If you insist on discussing only the tone, not the argument, you have to consider that the blog post you are commenting on is more than 10 years old. Would he write it in the same way today?

The tone is part of the message. In this article he describes the kind of strawman engineers he is disagreeing with as egotistical fools who believe “stupid” things. Elsewhere he’s writing oaths for programmers that say you should only build software according to his principles. It’s all very high and mighty.

If you are attacking the tone in order to avoid engaging with his actual arguments, then you are exhibiting the exact behavior which I described.

Why not debate the points in the article on their own merits? Which parts do you agree or disagree with, and why?

I disagree with the idea that “The start-up phase is not different” and that engineers should follow the same set of good engineering principles regardless of company age. It’s just not true. Anyone who has worked in industry has experienced “good engineering principles” standing in the way of actually succeeding as a business.

And other than that point it’s just a badly written article. Yeah it’s fun to read and has swear words in it but Bob doesn’t actually back up any of his points with supporting arguments, the whole thing is just a polemic. And the reason for this lack of supporting arguments is that Bob doesn’t have any industry experience to draw on so he can’t provide any first hand accounts to support his opinion. It’s nothing but grand sweeping statements about an area he has zero familiarity with.

Yeah.

I think there's something like scaling laws for development teams. A number of things change, the cost of refactoring, the cost of communication, the need for communication, the plausibility of everyone knowing everything, etc.

Practices that are necessary for a large team can really hamstring a small team. When you're just a few people, you can cut corners larger organizations can not. If you really lean into that, you can kinda run circles around those larger organizations with just a few developers.

Technical debt is probably the biggest thing that changes with size. With a small team it's a tool you can use to get more done, a bit like a mortgage can let you do things you couldn't otherwise. Refactoring is cheap when you are few, so you can usually pay it off it gets too bad.

Technical debt in large project with many developers is very different, as large refactoring operations are prohibitively expensive, and you should go to great lengths to ensure it doesn't increase.

Yeah, the old adage applies that the people making money and the people writing books on how to make money are different people.

Also known as "those who can't do, teach".

Having heard that, I'd caveat that with "Sometimes, those who have already done, teach."

Which then boils down to the student caution to ascertain whether the advice a solid professor is giving you has changed, since they last successfully did.

And also the observation that the number of students who are likely to be more successful ignoring education is pretty small: most people aren't that brilliant and will get better mileage out of learning and...

also known as those who can't do either (only), comment.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42353615

Your entire comment was "he used to be good at many things, but things I won't talk about have not been to my approval". You presented no facts, no thoughts, just said "others say" you are disinformation, because I'm less informed reading your comment then I was before

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