Jeff Atwood Finally Jumps the Shark
kevinwilliampang.com
kevinwilliampang.com
Come on, there's much more interesting people out there, don't focus on this nonsense.
Because citizens and users aren't producers nor journalists, they're just bored programmers dying for a drop of publicity.
Ah yes, only people with formal training have good ideas. Everyone else should step aside and make way for The Real Authors.
> Because citizens and users aren't producers nor journalists, they're just bored programmers dying for a drop of publicity.
Some people enjoy writing. Not every person who goes fishing on the weekends needs to be a commercial fisherman. Similarly, not everyone that writes need be a professional author.
I didn't say people with ideas shouldn't be writing and having blogs. I simply said they aren't journalists and they can't replace a group of professionals, i.e. folks who're doing it full time and have certain resources unavailable to a guy with a laptop.
Moreover, I didn't say a word about "formal training". BTW not all professional journalists have a formal training.
Don't try read between the lines and don't argue with imaginary opponent please. Besides, how exactly do you picture the world without "traditional" media? Links to what you're going to be posting to HN or reddit or digg then?
Joel Spolsky's dismissal of these rules is rather insulting from that perspective...but actually, he has formed his own intuitions and famous little sets of rules for how things should be done. Complaining that the principles of OO design, which aren't just Robert Martin's, but come from many sources, are too pedantic seems hypocritical.
Oh well, like the other people said, it's an offhand comment on a podcast, who cares? I can only imagine how much stupid stuff would come out of my mouth if I had to blather on about programming for an hour every week.
"principles are attempts by people working at the wizard level to try to communicate some of the things they do intuitively to people at other levels of learning"
Thinking of Robert Martin (Or Ron Jeffries or most of the agile consultant crowd) as "wizards" to learn from is hilarious. I've noticed that most of these people have no "wizard level" code or achievements to justify their role as "transmitters of wisdom".
A "wizard" should (imho) be able to do magic, not just talk about magic or write books about (how othe rpeople should do) magic.
When I think of "wizards" I think of people like Linus Torvalds or John Carmack or Peter Norvig or our own PG. In my opinion, one can learn more form one page of wizard code than all this abstract talk of "principles of coding" from people who haven't written any top notch code in years, if ever.
I agree in general, but I was talking about Robert Martin in particular. Check out his code: http://github.com/unclebob/fitnesse/tree/master It's really clean. While the guys you mention have been very effective and productive programmers (maybe by having better ideas and writing more useful applications), their code accomplished really new things, as opposed to finding better ways to do old things.
Norvig wrote some good books, but I never really got the sense of how he approaches a problem from them, although I did like the AI stuff quite a bit. Martin's "agile software development" is really good. I don't know why I benefit more from a little analysis on top of the code reading, but I think it helps me put a mental framework around stuff more quickly. Anyway, you've got to love a guy who writes a book called "UML for Java Programmers" that simply trashes UML...
It is decent certainly, but nothing very ground breaking (imo) which is what "wizard" would imply. In no field of endeavor I know do we call people "wizards" for mere competence. The term is (imho) reserved for people who do ground breaking things / display astounding levels of competence/performance. Iow, someone isn't a "wizard" musician just because he knows his scales.
You express this much better as "their code accomplished really new things, as opposed to finding better ways to do old things"). May be we just understand "wizard" differently, which is completely all right.
"Norvig wrote some good books, but I never really got the sense of how he approaches a problem from them, although I did like the AI stuff quite a bit. "
I learned quite a bit from his python code, specifically some of the AIMA code, and also his spelling corrector (http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html) and sudoku solver (http://norvig.com/sudoku.html).
How I learn from such examples is (1) I read the writeup to get a basic idea (2) I write my own version (in python for the spelling corrector example) and (3) see what differs between my version and the "wizard"'s.
Specifically to answer your "I never got an idea of how he approaches a problem from them"
Firstly, I wasn't speaking of Norvig's books but his code.
But let us speak of books- Have you read Norvig's "Paradigms Of Artificial Intelligence Programming"?. The whole book is essentially Norvig programming "blow by blow" finding mistakes and reversing design decisions and so on. I found it very useful to get some insight about his thinking and programming style.
Also Norvig does have some interesting thoughts on how to code in http://norvig.com/luv-slides.ps [postscript] where he talsk about how he iterates between an english description of an algorithm and (lisp) code till he gets it right.
All the people I mentioned (PG, Norvig, Carmack, Torvalds) are top level programmers (vs being people who make living from selling - in one form or another - programming methodologies telling other people how to code)and have publicly available "wizard level" code to learn from.
Robert Martin does write publicly available code - as does Kent Beck with Junit- so all due credit to them but most other agile "gurus" know jack all about coding at least as evidenced by their publicly available code. That said, I don't find Martin's code to be particularly inspiring as compared to the other people I mentioned. I find Martin's code to be competent but not "wizard level". I agree that this is largely a subjective judgment. YMMV.
As I said in my earlier post, I largely agree with your original point.
Wait, that's not cool at all. That's just lame.
Anyhow, alas, it was all for nought anyhow as kevinwilliampang.com has been beaten to the punch, repeatedly, as a quick Google search will show. '"jeff atwood" "jump the shark"' comes back with 267 results, not all accusing Jeff of jumping the shark, but enough to make my point.
Thinking hating on things is cool is for lamers. (Or some phrasing like that.)
:)
Seriously though, how many friggin times do we have to rehash these same darn podcast comments (and their fall out).
This folks, is what is called a Judgement Call. How much time you spend on testing, what kind testing you do, etc... is all really subject the programmer's need. If Jeff Atwood can write bug free code without OOD than so be it. If you CAN'T and you try to use his example you are going to find out real quickly that it was a bad idea.
So there's no need for a bunch of blog debate. As long as people are familiar with SOLID principles they can make up their own minds.
Either way, my point wasn't that Jeff Atwood is a moron and whatever he says should be disregarded. Sorry if it came across as that. The point I was trying to make was that his disregard for code quality and the SOLID principles in specific is dangerous and that the massive amount of readership he gets and the support they have for his beliefs makes that doubly so.
He can write his blog the next time he writes some code to go with it. Or does some research. Right now, the only reason he is popular is because he says what people want to hear. That's pandering -- not intellect.
Anyway, I guess I don't care. I realized a long time ago that most people are stupid, and stupid likes to travel in hordes. There is plenty of real education out there for people who seek it.
Upon further reflection, it wasn't really that great of a comment.
Jeff Atwood: Rules, guidelines, and principles are gems of distilled experience that should be studied and respected. But they're never a substute for thinking critically about your work.
Kevin Pang: we should be in support of anything that will force programmers to think more about the code they write, not less
Aside from brand arguments about "Agile" versus "SOLID" versus "what-would-Jesus-do" style programming, where, exactly, is the "war" here?
Q: Has Jef Atwood jumped the shark?
A: Hell no. If you don't like is blog, don't read it. Stackoverflow is still a great resource.
Q: Is SOLID a good idea that more programmers should read?
A: Hell yes.
Q: So why is he "waging war against SOLID" and saying we shouldn't we follow these rules?
A: He didn't say that. Solid principles are absolutely worth knowing. But when you're a master programmer, they more what you'd call "guidelines" than actual rules. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuhari)
Q: do these "Ferengi rulebook programmers" exist?
A: it's rare, but they do.
Q: So Kevin Pang is wrong then?
A: Well, he's wrong about Atwood jumping the shark. He's right that the vast majority of programmers aren't masters, so Atwood's points don't apply to them and they should learn the rules. Maybe he's wrong to get into a blog-post-fist-fight, maybe he's right to stir up debate. Take your pick on how you want to see that one.
Is this not what you were doing with this post, by singling out the author instead of the argument?