Comment by imjonse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by imjonse | Hacker News Reader

I am biased ( a former coworker was an Uncle Bob fan, and was bent on doing everything by the book, with layers of abstraction, patterns, hexagonal architecture, lots of unit tests, no cutting corners, even as we did not know what exactly we want to build and needed an MVP ASAP) but I'll just say this: Ousterhout wrote TCL - widely considered one of the best C codebases - besides being a professor at Standford and having other software achievements under their belt, while Robert Martin is more like a software technology evangelist. The former good at actual deliverables the latter good at selling.

Also Ousterhout's book on design is very easy to read and I guess I liked it because I mostly just nodded in approval while reading and there were very few things that made me stop.

Biased against the approach of your former coworker and thus the "Clean Code" way? I assume it did not work out well, because you needed to move fast to build an MVP before trying to do it right?

yes, biased against knowing 'the best way do write software' and applying it regardless of what the current requirements and constraints are. And arguing for their position by sending people links to Uncle Bob videos for 'enlightenment'.

Following Clean Code is not the right way to develop software in any stage of the project. It is a few opinions of someone who has not actually written any code of substance. In addition to Clean Code being a bad approach, it can also be a very slow process.

Let's not forget that Uncle Bob, by the time of writing "Clean Code" had 4 decades coding experience.

My middle school English teacher had 4 decades of experience writing. What she wrote was lesson plans. That doesn't make her Stephen King.

Do not make the mistake of the craftsman who claims to have 20 years of experience, but in truth only has 1 year of experience repeated 20 times.

Are there large code bases that he has written that we know anything about?

Software is results driven, there's no value in simply warming a seat for X YOE, talking about code instead of actually executing.

What has he shipped, though?

Kenneth Copeland has been a pastor for 50 years and his theology and pastoral practice is still terrible. Years of experience is not a useful metric when you could instead look at results.

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