41–50 of 88 posts
In all fairness, how can anyone compare Peter Norvig and Ron Jeffries on the same level? One is an AI genius and the other is a XP coach. They are on very different levels intellectually.
I generally take a middle road - I write code that is unit-testable, but I rarely take the time to write exhaustive tests. When bugs arise, I start writing test cases in various components until I find them. Thus, the debugging effort is what grows the test coverage. Of course in a vacuum it's better to have the cases earlier rather than later, but I like this approach as a speed/quality compromise. The key to making…
Not a good practice and ideal but it is practical. IMHO
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Unclear on how anybody can cite the author of the latter with any kind of reverence, but I see that happen all the time.
Enlighten us folks who aren't methodology scenesters. What is wrong this Uncle Bob guy?
He has a big respect in certain circles, and even I have the Refactoring book, which was a disappointment for me, because it was about practices that was trivial for me after two years of proferssional work, while going into the details too much.
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Enlighten us folks who aren't methodology scenesters. What is wrong this Uncle Bob guy?
Martin Fowler is an enterprise buzzword methodologist. He was into UML, refactoring and patterns and Java back in the days. Nowadays he is into agile, TDD and ruby. He has a big respect in certain circles, and even I have the Refactoring book, which was a disappointment for me, because it was about practices that was trivial for me after two years of proferssional work, while going into the details too much.
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Martin Fowler is an enterprise buzzword methodologist. He was into UML, refactoring and patterns and Java back in the days. Nowadays he is into agile, TDD and ruby. He has a big respect in certain circles, and even I have the Refactoring book, which was a disappointment for me, because it was about practices that was trivial for me after two years of proferssional work, while going into the details too much.
Martin Fowler != Robert C Martin (Uncle Bob)
I'm in the "want to believe" category with TDD, solely for the reason that I think there are a lot of smart people advocating it. Having said that, I haven't seen a lot of teams that use it and continue using it for a competitive advantage -- and that sets off alarm bells. The hype may very well be ahead of reality on this one. I honestly don't know.
This kind of attitude really pisses me off. It's so confident in its condescension and name-calling, I have a little wonder that they might be right. In fact, it's just dogmatic abuse, unencumbered by an objective factual appraisal of the issue at hand. Probably, I should just remember that dogmatism tends to be inversely related to wisdom.
For one thing, the purpose of the code makes a tremendous difference: e.g. unit-testing is great for maintainability, but terrible for evolving an API (as in prototyping or exploratory code).
And thank goodness for Knuth.
If you enjoyed seeing the contrast in approaches between Norvig and Jeffries, you may also find the following interesting -- calculating bowling scores in 1. OCaml, no tests: http://alaska-kamtchatka.blogspot.com/2009/07/disfunctional-... 2. Clojure with unit tests: http://blog.objectmentor.com/articles/2009/07/19/uncle-bob-j...
In the blog post Brad Fitzpatrick is quoted as saying "Write a test. Prove it to me." Now maybe it's my maths background, but when someone say "prove it" a expect proof, and the bowling unit test example proves nothing more than that it works in a few common cases.
Yes I realize that proving anything non trivial in programming is Very Hard, but without any sort of reasonable attempt and even talking about this problem TDD seems more or less ad hoc to me.
If you enjoyed seeing the contrast in approaches between Norvig and Jeffries, you may also find the following interesting -- calculating bowling scores in 1. OCaml, no tests: http://alaska-kamtchatka.blogspot.com/2009/07/disfunctional-... 2. Clojure with unit tests: http://blog.objectmentor.com/articles/2009/07/19/uncle-bob-j...
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I don't know him from Adam, but his "TDD-based" bowling attempt in Clojure seems like a microcosm of that other guy's Sudoku solver in Ruby.
I asked because I have seen a few other people whose opinions I respect dismiss his writings. So I had to ask. Cheers!
Someone like Linus Torvalds can pull this off, Bob Martin, not so much. Linus nearly always has good reasons for his stated beliefs and agree or disagree you can see why he says what he says. Also he is an acknowledged uber hacker. Bob Martin does write code(Fitnesse) unlike most other agile "guru"/consultant types, but it isn't really anything extraordinary (which is all right, as long as he doesn't presume to then teach other people how to program "correctly").
It is interesting that a great hacker like Peter Norvig is modest and unassuming and chooses his words carefully, as does Knuth for example, while people like Ron Jeffries and "Uncle" Bob say outrageous things with nothing to back them up but faith in their ideology .. err.. methodology .