211–220 of 220 posts
>What’s more, processors are so cheap and available that it is a trivial matter to add more of them to a system. I don't know what Uncle Bob uses but the motherboard in my PC has exactly one CPU socket. And at $600 I wouldn't say it's cheap. I'm not sure how can I add another CPU to my laptop and my mobile phone. Also not all software is multithreaded.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just yesterday, when discussing our company's grades, someone joked that the difference between a junior and a senior developer is that a junior developer should learn to know when to use OOP/abstractions while a senior developer should learn to recognize when OOP/abstractions are to be avoided.
Used to be a similar joke in frontend a few years ago when css was at its complexity peak. Where the progression is junior: "I'll just use bootstrap", mid: "I'll write my own css custom tailored to the project", senior: "I'll just use bootstrap." I also think some of this... attitude? learning? is what go is trying to activate/take advantage of. Everywhere I've worked has had some monstrously experienced senior dev w…
For a junior the answer is more "I'll just use bootstrap and customize as much as needed".
While for a senior it's more in line with "I'll just use bootstrap, but you bet I will be on the designer's ass if they ask to customize stuff where it's not necessary."
There is a reason the mid-level developer wanted to write custom CSS. And the reason is that they didn't have the political capital to make bootstrap alone work in a way that is good for the company.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not fond of Clean Code, but I am fond of Clean Architecture. It's a much smaller set of ideas, for a start.
I gave up on Clean Architecture after about one chapter. There's a section where he's graphing the number of lines of code in a hypothetical company's codebase over time - it grows rapidly at first and then it levels off, and he points at this like it means anything , specifically like it's a bad thing and it means the software has become difficult to work in. Also this isn't a line chart, it's a bar chart, and the X…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Robert C Martin's (who is not my uncle) Clean Code book/advice is what I would call junior programmer material. Its good to get someone started to think about better ways of writing software (albeit is hasn't aged very well). I don't recommend it to juniors anymore because it hasn't aged well and is for my taste hyperbolic in its promises. IMHO clean code also is more focused on code implementing "business logic" tha…
I am not fond of Clean Code, but I am fond of Clean Architecture. It's a much smaller set of ideas, for a start.
https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts/catalog/funct...
https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/boundaries
It seems unrelated in the surface, but I feel like they explain the "why" of a software architecture in a much simpler way and without the prescriptive and hand-wavy "trust me" nature of most software architecture books.
It is debatable if Clean Code actually improves the programmer efficiency and programs readability. I find people applying it religiously often create over-complex designs like FizzBuzz Enterprise. Even Uncle Bob's examples are not the state of the art in readability: https://qntm.org/clean The main problem seems to be that Clean Code is mostly a premature optimisation in code flexibility. It makes code more complex…
Thanks, this comment accurately captures my discomfort when reading the parts where Uncle Bob was talking. He consistently portrays Clean Code as a programmer friendliness vs processor speed tradeoff, while my impression of Clean Code has never been that it’s slow and programmer friendly, but full of overengineered design patterns that are horrible to read.“Premature optimisation in code flexibility” is a really succ…
It is debatable if Clean Code actually improves the programmer efficiency and programs readability. I find people applying it religiously often create over-complex designs like FizzBuzz Enterprise. Even Uncle Bob's examples are not the state of the art in readability: https://qntm.org/clean The main problem seems to be that Clean Code is mostly a premature optimisation in code flexibility. It makes code more complex…
> Clean Code is mostly a premature optimization in code flexibility > in practice the code has to be significantly changed/rewritten anyway when a business requirement change appears. Tying these two together. Clean Code doesn't distinguish between framework code and business logic code. Or more you should write the latter like the former. The problem is writing framework code is hard to do well. It needs to be well…
The coding culture around Clean Code seems to put a lot of effort into "building frameworks on top of frameworks" without really admitting it, and the "framework-y bits" are intertwined with business logic, like exposed piping in a building. But business logic should look more like Golang instead.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, you’ve been arguing for using switch statements, instead of Clean Code’s suggestion of using object-oriented polymorphism, in a context where polymorphism doesn’t exist?
Not at all. Not having classes is not the same as not having polymorphism. Rust supports polymorphism just fine (and one could argue its support for polymorphism is actually much more advanced than that of Java's; but that's not enough reason to use it everywhere).
I don't recommend to juniors any of the books of people like Uncle Bob, Fowler, etc... Those are full of advices that seem reasonable but extremely generic and tend to be followed with religious fervour by people with limited experience resulting in an unreadable bug-ridden mess. When I think about those authors a single question comes to mind: What have they ever built? Reading code from popular opensource projects…
> What have they ever built? While I agree that reading code and learning is essential, I don’t think this line of criticism is fair. I mean like most programmers I’d imagine their years and years of industry work isn’t public. I mean what have I ever built? Fowler was CTO of ThoughWorks for years and afaik they do really good and deep work, their content is quality. Bob Martin had a similar track record with 8th lig…
Fowler's books are very descriptive, Refactoring is clearly a list of strategies. And there's even conflicting advice, since it's meant to be a catalog rather than a rule book.
Clean Code on the other hand is very prescriptive.
Not that it matters, the people that wrote the GoF Patterns book have been saying for years that their book is descriptive but very few people hear it.
I shudder to even think of the cumulative ecological cost of Bob's line of thinking, here. Imagine if Henry Ford did this... we'd all be getting 0.3mpg, but hey... productivity!
Imagine software that was delivered 6 months earlier but is 2x slower than it could be. This lead to productivity increase of it's users of 2x during that 6 months. At the expense of some extra electricity use worth $100, they made $10M worth of real world productivity. My point is... the thing that is much worse than software that is unnecessary slow, is the software that was not yet written at all. Now ... I think…
I shudder to even think of the cumulative ecological cost of Bob's line of thinking, here. Imagine if Henry Ford did this... we'd all be getting 0.3mpg, but hey... productivity!
Imagine software that was delivered 6 months earlier but is 2x slower than it could be. This lead to productivity increase of it's users of 2x during that 6 months. At the expense of some extra electricity use worth $100, they made $10M worth of real world productivity. My point is... the thing that is much worse than software that is unnecessary slow, is the software that was not yet written at all. Now ... I think…