Those who know, know.
I was a big Uncle Bob fan and still really like the Clean Code book. But he trashed his public reputation so I doubt this 2nd edition will do very well.
I am also a big fan of his books, especially Clean Code. His (far-)right opinions are bad, but should be (to some extent) viewed separately from his technical standpoints. However, even then a new edition would not perform well, there are too many people hating Clean Code (without really understanding its message/just ranting without having read it). But I was very surprised that ThePrimeagen recently interviewed his “opponent”, it was very nice to watch.
Is there a TL;DR if I don’t know who this is?
Basically he is an old man/ software engineer who’s famous for his philosophy of coding.
Any context on him “trashing his reputation”?
He made some political remarks on Twitter that many people didn’t like.
oh no somebody stop please him
Ooh la la 😏
But is it rewritten in Rust?
Closure! (I don’t think so, not many programmers like reading/writing functional code. But it is his current favorite language, so, who knows?)
It’ll be rewritten in mdBook
i am genuinely waiting for it. read the first one almost 10 years ago and it gave me a good start into my programming journey.
even if this second version won’t bring in anything new for me, I will be glad to consume it
Is this the book that introduced SOLID?
no, but the concept was introduced by uncle Bob.
I’m a programmer since the 80s, who is this guy?
He wrote for example the books Clean Code and Clean Architecture which are IMO opinion really good books although I don’t agree with every point he makes.
Some really good points he makes are for example:
- Functions that only do one job
- Testing makes refactoring easier
- The standard SOLID OOP stuff.
- Tech debt is bad
- Abstraction and encapsulation is good and allows developers to interact with the code on a higher level in terms of actions instead of writing verbose stuff. Essentially saying less code leads to less bugs
- Insulate yourself from change
- Duplication is bad
- Two use cases that are very similar is not duplication and should not be refactored.
- Don’t mix high level code with low level.
- Build solid Entity classes to model the data and their interactions.
Those comes with examples. He’s a tad bit overly idealistic in my opinion. These books fail to mention a couple of things:
- Refactoring is expensive and the cost is often not justified.
- Premature abstraction is the absolute devil
- You don’t need to insulate from things that are very unlikely to change (like going from SQL to Document DB)
- Less changes also lead to less bugs.
- Too much emphasis on functions being few lines of code instead of just being simple.
All in all though, very solid books. I read Clean Code in university and Clean Architecture in my first job and it really helped me wrap my head around different ways to solve the same problem. Excellent ideas but it’s not the holy truth. New programmers should read it and take inspiration, craftsman level developers should criticise it and expects can mostly skip it.
The consultancy I used to work for in the late 90s would have crucified any developer that didn’t write “a data abstraction layer that allows you to pop off the original db and substitute a different one later”.
How many times in my 25 year career have I swapped out the database (and been thankful for such an abstraction layer)? 0 times.
I am literally in the middle of swapping DynamoDB for a RDBMS.
The idea that you can abstract away such fundamentally different data stores is silly. While I hate doing it now, reworking the code to use relational models properly makes for a better product later.
It’s literally what an orm does, and it’s good enough for 80% of apps out there. Using it for the wrong purpose is what’s silly.
I see. It seems like you may be one of the people that try to coerce relational models into nosql stores like Dynamo.
Or course it’s possible. They even trick you into thinking it’s a good pattern by naming things “tables”.
But if you’re using Dynamo to its fullest an ORM is not going to be able to replicate that into a relational store without some fundamental changes.
While he advocates for it, that’s also a point that Martin brings up multiple times when he talks about his project “fitnesse”.
Basically saying that they left it open how stuff can be saved, but the need has never arisen to actually pivot to a different system.
In my 15 year career? Dozens. Maybe low hundreds. Depends what you work on. Oracle is not making any friends lately and a ton of companies a whole-sale migrating to Postgres, MongoDB, DynamoDB or some of the NewSQL contenders. It’s like 50% of the projects I’m involved in. Results are generally positive, with some spectacular wins (x3000 acceleration or x1000 lower costs) and a few losses.
I generally agree with the idea that code should be as simple as it can be to accomplish the goal of the code… I just haven’t been convinced that Clean Code is the way to get there, necessarily. The book does contain some good advice , to be sure, but I wouldn’t call it universal by any means.
I also think TDD is a very optimistic strategy that just doesn’t match up with reality terribly often.
Actually, I think that’s what confuses me the most about all of Uncle Bob’s books. I’ve read a couple of them and thought, “All this sounds great but real world development just doesn’t seem to work that way.” Like, all of his advice is for best case scenarios that I certainly haven’t encountered in my career.
I say confusing, because surely he’s been in the profession long enough to have seen the disconnect between what he’s preaching and real life, right???
Wrote a couple famous books about Clean Code, Architecture, Test Driven Development, OOP, and Agile.
he’s a programmer since the 70s
Robert C. Martin
Your long lost son, perhaps
Cleaner Code.
Waiting for him to finish the trilogy with Cleanest Code
cleanerer code. gotta leave room for a fourth book: clean code and the crystal skull
Isn’t that the guy who caused the whole Factorio Kovarex controversy?
What kovarex controversy? Link? Context?
Had to dig around a little, but I think I got some context :
I don’t recall Uncle Bob being sexist or racist, but maybe I missed something.
During the George Floyd Protests, Robert gives us a beautiful take that police stopping black people isn’t racist, it’s just math.
Unfortunately a sizable portion of programmers and engineers are like this. It’s probably because they can only think in black and white.
A lot of these old-fashion types are oblivious to social justice and get upset at even the thought that Institutional racism even exists, because they can point to their one black friend in tech who owns a mansion.
I used to get into arguments why master and slave was a problematic word to engineers. That’s how ignorant they are.
Those folks are dying out, especially as more diversity exists. Which is humourous because these folks will also rage about that too.
oh no
Don’t ask his opinions about the term “statutory rape”!
Yes. I never looked at kovarex the same since.
i guess this time the book involves a foreword in every chapter written by a woman that explains why they shouldn’t be allowed behind a computer
“A woman wrote that joke”
Dare I ask?
twitter happened, I guess
But today I stumbled across a long twitter thread that I can only describe as intentional character assassination. The author of this thread is misrepresenting facts and making some pretty nasty accusations. Again this is not all that unusual, except for the fact that I was not invited to defend myself. […] The gist of this author’s thread is that I am a misogynist; and that I should not be taken seriously in any regard. I understand that efforts have been made to have me excluded from conferences, and to boycott the publisher of my books, etc.
- Uncle Bob in 2017
So… What is the problem of women in tech? Either I skimmed over this or he fails to get to that point at all.
well, that’s up to women in tech to explain what the movement advocates for, he’s laying out his experience
Not even that, he’s basically using 1000 word essay to say “I can’t be a misogynist, I hired women” as if that says anything. The words “the problem with women in tech” are both mentioned many times in the article as well as its title, but somehow it’s not about that problem at all, but the fact he got called a misogynist and that he now has conflicted feelings about it.
Man, this is such a bad defence, let alone article.
This is just a lot about people’s reactions to something, but nothing about what that something actually was
It’d be nice to see what the actual something was so one could judge for themselves
Edit: I took a look at his twitter, and he seems to be pro-trump and anti-kamala and anti-waltz, as well as transphobia thrown in here and there and more that I didn’t bother to read
…so I’m gonna go with “the people’s reactions to him likely had a point”
exactly, vague accusations in a lot of places, nothing remotely concrete.
…so I’m gonna go with “the people’s reactions to him likely had a point”
…and this is exactly the problem
You know what? You can find enough concrete shit from just reading his twitter for 5 minutes. Stuff posted in the last few weeks.
Hmm. The initial drama seems bullshit, starting a huge fight over the word “craftsmanship” is just hypersensitive at best or toxic behavior to manufacture outrage at worst. A gender neutral terms would be preferable but hardly the biggest issue right now.
But since “uncle bob” supports Trump then that alone is enough to condemn him as a supporter of fascism and bigotry.
Like what? Some L takes on wars or politics? Because that’s all I’m seeing.
ah yes, as we all know statistically these people tend to have a very sane opinion of women
Interesting, thanks, I didn’t know anything about that. I’ve probably looked at the book at some point, but don’t remember anything about it.
I don’t have any examples personally, but I’ve been told by a lot of people that he has some views about women, race, sex, homosexuality, etc which many would find objectionable.
hearsay
sigh I looked at his Twitter and it’s pretty standard right-wing politics. Maybe slightly more progressive than modern right-wingers, but still vomiting GOP propaganda.
ok, I’m left, but how’s that of any relevance.
if you can’t put a name or even quote an allegation, maybe you shouldn’t comment.
there are lots of intellectually dishonest people intentionally misrepresenting what others say in the hopes others - like yourself - parrot it just for likes and visibility.
It’s not exactly news, his invitation to a conference was pulled because every other speaker refused to share a stage with him over his behavior / the politics he spews on Twitter.
A true man of the 70s-80s…
I should get to work on my opus, “Dirty Code”
Inside I’ll reveal all my secrets like: not writing tests, not documenting anything, putting the whole app into a single python file, object-disoriented relational mapping, obscure SQL tricks, unobscure no-sql tricks, and more!
I hope the tricks are only supported on kafka’s ksql.
object-disoriented
I’ll steal this to shit talk about code; until git blame points to my past self
Github, but it’s afraid of commitment, it just wants to spoon.
I like “how to build APIs you won’t hate”.
Just make sure the first chapter is dedicated to spaghetti, and contains various GOTO statements telling where the reader where to go shove it and other obscenities.
I read a book like this once! It was like, “how to code badly.”
It was actually kinda fun.
I hope your book won’t have a table of context and those stupid indexes. If they read it, they should know where you mention topics, right? Tables of contents considered harmful! /s
Glad I didn’t read it.
The bit of Clean Code that I read was unimpressive, but Clean Architecture was amazing. I view that book as required reading for anyone who wants to write code professionally. If Uncle Bob hasn’t realized that his coding style is worse than alternatives, I do not see how a second version of the same bad ideas is going to do well.
Thanks for the warning
He must have been waiting for me to buy a copy.
Working in Ruby did 10x more to help me write clean code than reading Clean Code ever did.
Many of the lessons drilled into me with Ruby (keep a consistent style, tests are cheap, keep your methods relatively small where possible, reduce nesting where possible) carry over nicely into other languages without needing to go through any OO bullshit.
IMO, the best lesson around Clean Code is this: you’re not clever, write obvious code that works with as few tricks as possible.
I find this to be true for every new language I try out. Since every language has a different way of doing things and gives me a new perspective, in the long run they all end up improving my programming style as a whole. I always end up integrating the best parts of each into my next project when possible.
Experience will always be more valuable than any set of rules these kind of books tout as “the way things are meant to be done”.
Is this a cute joke or is he being serious and oblivious?
