Clean Code vs. A Philosophy Of Software Design • Hacker News Board

Re: Clean Code vs. A Philosophy Of Software Design

#551

Post by unclebobmartin » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 3:19 PM UTC

overgard wrote: post #67

Bob's comments on... commenting.. are so bizarre that I can't help but think that he just refuses to concede the point rather than admit he might have been wrong about it. Like, the paranoia around incorrect/stale comments is fairly absurd, I've been coding for 20 years across many code bases, and I can't even recall a time when I've been significantly mislead by a comment which caused a significant waste of time. Ho…

Actually, I presented that figure as an example of just how difficult that problem was to understand, and how (on a bike ride) I was finally able to visualize what was going on. The ascii image was presented a bit tongue in cheek.

However, if you study that image, you might come to the same insight that I (on my bike ride) came to; and that the english comments never helped me with.

Re: Clean Code vs. A Philosophy Of Software Design

#552

Post by unclebobmartin » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 3:20 PM UTC

getnormality wrote: post #12

Uncle Bob's insistence that functions should be 2-4 lines long is baffling to me. I don't understand how he can be taken seriously. Is there a single application in the entire world with substantial functionality that conforms to this rule?

You should be baffled, because I never presented that as a hard and fast rule.

Re: Clean Code vs. A Philosophy Of Software Design

#553

Post by unclebobmartin » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 3:23 PM UTC

imjonse wrote: post #75

rester324 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uncle Bob is one of the core contributors to Fitnesse, which had moderate success in the Java popularity era back in the day. Also, you do understand that people worked as software engineers even before Github became popular, or open sourcing to begin with, do you? So if someone is 60+ year old, chances are that most of his work has never been open sourced, and his work was targeting use cases, platforms, services wh…

> So if someone is 60+ year old, chances are that most of his work has never been open sourced, John Ousterhout is 70 years old and one of the open source pioneers. We don't know what Uncle Bob shipped or did not ship but his friendly opponent in this discussion definitley did ship high profile projects.

I'm 72. As for what I have shipped over the half-century of my career, you can read all about that in part two of my book We, Programmers. Suffice it to say I've shipped a LOT of code.

Re: Clean Code vs. A Philosophy Of Software Design

#554

Post by chillpenguin » Thu, Mar 06, 2025, 4:27 PM UTC

recursivedoubts wrote: post #27

chillpenguin wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"john ousterhout's book is the only book on how to write software that has any actual evidence behind it." This is false and hopefully no one takes you seriously when they read that. There are books about empirical methods for software engineering, for example, which actually seek to find real evidence for software engineering techniques. See Greg Wilson's work, for example. There are lots of other architecture/desig…

> no links

Here is a whole course, with videos and links to slides and readings.

https://github.com/margaretstorey/EmseUvic2020