Hacker News Reader

Comment by antonymoose | Hacker News Reader

I would charitably say that it’s a function of a different time and place in programming. The way you write “Clean COBOL,” “Clean Java 6/J2EE,” and “Clean Rust” are all going to be very different.

There is still good meat-on-the-bone in the book, and especially interesting if you’re working in a legacy system from that older time and place.

View on HN

Not to mention that "Clean Code" is from the era where many developers were still sticking MySQL calls into the middle of their HTML. It was trying to wrangle an audience that didn't put any real thought into code, trying to convince them that they should. That is an audience that doesn't meaningfully exist now. While there are still disagreements on exactly what the code should look like, most everyone now agrees that it is something worth thinking about, in large part because of efforts like "Clean Code" putting bugs in ears. It isn't what you would write today, but it wasn't written today.

Without fail, if a developer is "pissed off", it is because they are judging something from the past by ignoring the conditions of the past.

> I would charitably say that it’s a function of a different time and place in programming.

I really think it was just one persons opinion that got published. I started in the 80's and at each software company I worked at they had standard styles that I think we're very clean and organized without being overly dogmatic in any one direction.

> I really think it was just one persons opinion that got published.

What alternative is there? Obviously very few of the ideas in the book were conceived of by Uncle Bob himself, but his editorial opinion is what chose which ideas to include. If that weren't the case, his name wouldn't be on the book.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com