3 ms·

Might be OT, but what is the opinion on Martin Fowler in general?

by a_imho 9y ago

stuartaxelowen 9y ago
Sometimes right, sometimes wrong. I thought his position on TDD was a little impractical, but I wouldn't hold it against him.
lmm 9y ago
Doesn't know what he doesn't know. There's some good advice among what he says, but he also generalises far beyond the limits of his experience.
maxxxxx 9y ago
I think he often states the obvious but gives it a nice new name.
- pgwhalen 9y ago
  That's a good way of putting it, and I think he would actually agree with you on that. I was at his "Event driven architecture" talk at Goto Chicago where he talked about four patterns that can show up in something you might call event driven. He didn't presume to be inventing anything, just categorizing some patterns that have been recognized before, with the intent of clearing up some of the haziness/hype that occurs when someone says they have an event driven architecture.
acdha 9y ago
He's smart and experienced. That doesn't mean he's always right but I would consider what he says and reason through disagreements. Most commonly, I find the right/wrong arguments are actually reflecting the fact that the underlying environments aren't as similar as they might seem at first glance. Someone giving advice based on working on an F500 team with 200 developers will have seemingly-bizarre priorities to a 5 person startup, just as advice from someone at Google used to handling multiple orders of magnitude more traffic is likely expensive overkill for that small team.
- eropple 9y ago
  I agree with this. I used to be a lot more down on his work, but it wasn't his fault so much as all the wannabes who bought it uncritically. (Much the same as stuff like Kubernetes--you aren't Google, they have Google problems, you don't have Google problems, stop automatically adopting Google solutions to problems that are a-web-server problems.)
  - acdha 9y ago
    I really strongly agree with your point about uncritical thinking. Our industry seems to be especially prone to dogma and so many arguments seem to be people not realizing that they're talking past each other.
  - guscost 9y ago
    > you aren't Google, they have Google problems, you don't have Google problems Don't underestimate how hard it can be for developers to accept this. The hacker community can become a tedious game of one-upsmanship at times, and it's way too easy to slip into "imposter syndrome" mode. Often, the people barking loudest about the newest ideas have slipped themselves, and are just trying not to appear clueless. But cluelessness is fine. It's the default state of being, we all need to be comfortable (if not satisfied) with it. I don't want to suggest that Martin Fowler is clueless, of course. He has described many prudent battle-tested techniques that can be absolutely essential in context. If you haven't seen his article on Collection Pipelines, it's relevant to all kinds of modern programming: https://martinfowler.com/articles/collection-pipeline/ https://martinfowler.com/articles/collection-pipeline/
sotojuan 9y ago
Probably a better source of information than the trendy blog posts written by 20 somethings we get here.

Might be OT, but what is the opinion on Martin Fowler in general?

by a_imho 9y ago

Might be OT, but what is the opinion on Martin Fowler in general?

Sometimes right, sometimes wrong. I thought his position on TDD was a little impractical, but I wouldn't hold it against him.

lmm 9y ago

Doesn't know what he doesn't know. There's some good advice among what he says, but he also generalises far beyond the limits of his experience.

maxxxxx 9y ago

I think he often states the obvious but gives it a nice new name.

pgwhalen 9y ago
That's a good way of putting it, and I think he would actually agree with you on that. I was at his "Event driven architecture" talk at Goto Chicago where he talked about four patterns that can show up in something you might call event driven. He didn't presume to be inventing anything, just categorizing some patterns that have been recognized before, with the intent of clearing up some of the haziness/hype that occurs when someone says they have an event driven architecture.

acdha 9y ago

He's smart and experienced. That doesn't mean he's always right but I would consider what he says and reason through disagreements. Most commonly, I find the right/wrong arguments are actually reflecting the fact that the underlying environments aren't as similar as they might seem at first glance. Someone giving advice based on working on an F500 team with 200 developers will have seemingly-bizarre priorities to a 5 person startup, just as advice from someone at Google used to handling multiple orders of magnitude more traffic is likely expensive overkill for that small team.

eropple 9y ago
I agree with this. I used to be a lot more down on his work, but it wasn't his fault so much as all the wannabes who bought it uncritically. (Much the same as stuff like Kubernetes--you aren't Google, they have Google problems, you don't have Google problems, stop automatically adopting Google solutions to problems that are a-web-server problems.)
- acdha 9y ago
  I really strongly agree with your point about uncritical thinking. Our industry seems to be especially prone to dogma and so many arguments seem to be people not realizing that they're talking past each other.
- guscost 9y ago
  > you aren't Google, they have Google problems, you don't have Google problems Don't underestimate how hard it can be for developers to accept this. The hacker community can become a tedious game of one-upsmanship at times, and it's way too easy to slip into "imposter syndrome" mode. Often, the people barking loudest about the newest ideas have slipped themselves, and are just trying not to appear clueless. But cluelessness is fine. It's the default state of being, we all need to be comfortable (if not satisfied) with it. I don't want to suggest that Martin Fowler is clueless, of course. He has described many prudent battle-tested techniques that can be absolutely essential in context. If you haven't seen his article on Collection Pipelines, it's relevant to all kinds of modern programming: https://martinfowler.com/articles/collection-pipeline/ https://martinfowler.com/articles/collection-pipeline/

sotojuan 9y ago

Probably a better source of information than the trendy blog posts written by 20 somethings we get here.