> It's striking to me how out of touch Martin seems to be with the realities of software engineering in this transcript. Stylistic refactors that induce performance regressions, extremely long and tortured method names for three-line methods, near-total animus towards comments ... regardless of who is right/wrong about what, those takes seem like sophomoric extremism at its worst, not reasoned pragmatism that can be applied to software development in the large.

I think you're talking out of ignorance. Let's take a moment to actually think about the arguments that Uncle Bob makes in his Clean Code book.

He argues in favor of optimizing your code for clarity and readability. The main goal of code is to help a programmer understand it and modify it easily and efficiently. What machines do with it is of lower priority. Why? Because a programmer's time is far more expensive than any infrastructure cost.

How do you make code clear and easy to read? Uncle Bob offers his advise. Have method names that tell you what they do, so that programmers can easily reason about the code without having to even check what the function does. Extract low-level code to higher level methods so that a function call describes what it does at the same level of detail. Comments is a self-admission you failed to write readable code, and you can fix your failure by refactoring code into self-descriptive member functions.

Overall, it's an optimization problem where the single objective is defined as readability. Consequently, it's obvious that performance regressions are acceptable.

Do you actually have any complain about it? If you read what you wrote, you'll notice you say nothing specific or concrete: you only throw blanket ad hominems that sound very spiteful, but are void of any substance.

What's the point of that?

> Maintainability/appropriate factoring are subjective qualities that depend a lot on the project, the other programmers on it, and the expectations around how software engineering is done in that environment.

The problem with your blend of arguments is that guy's like you are very keen on whining and criticizing others for the opinions they express, but when lightly pressed on the subject you show that you actually have nothing to offer in the way of alternative or guideline or anything at all. Your argument boils down to "you guys have a style which you follow consistently, but I think I have a style as well and somehow I believe my taste, which I can't even specify, should prevail". It's fine tha you have opinions, but why are you criticizing others for having them?