4 ms·

I sometimes wonder if people like Bob Martin aka "Uncle Bob" and Martin Fowler have done more damage than good with their arbitrary rules. Or maybe people are t

by smnplk 7y ago

I sometimes wonder if people like Bob Martin aka "Uncle Bob" and Martin Fowler have done more damage than good with their arbitrary rules. Or maybe people are too blindly following their rules in every aspect of software design.

ameyv 7y ago
True. But i guess the problem is also of people who use what others say with face value, without actually understanding trade offs.
derefr 7y ago
Fowler mostly just writes anthropologically about design patterns he encounters, explaining how to implement them given that you’ve decided to implement them. He says a lot of “you’ve got to do X”, but in the context of the article it means “evidence suggests that you’ve got to do X if you’re doing Y; otherwise, what you’re doing won’t be recognized as Y and people will get confused when you call it Y.” Fowler’s work is to software design-patterns as https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog is to English idioms: someone who provides analyses of what usages are accepted and why, and what usages will get your text a bemused eyebrow-raise. Robert C. Martin, meanwhile, is certainly paternalistic, but there’s a bit of lost context to his writings: they’re targeted at the army of “Java school” devs going directly from school to working at the big Java shops of the 90s. His advice actually works quite well if your goal is to bootstrap yourself from an education of “programming” but no “software engineering”, directly to being able to leave a large pre-existing Java codebase “better than you found it.” (His advice is no substitute for reading the code, absorbing the architecture, and then extending it in natural and intuitive ways—but 90s Java shops rarely gave their devs time to do that before moving them to the next project.)
- smnplk 7y ago
  Do not forget Fowlers twitter influences https://twitter.com/martinfowler/status/893100444507144192?lang=en https://twitter.com/martinfowler/status/893100444507144192?l...

by smnplk 7y ago

ameyv 7y ago

True. But i guess the problem is also of people who use what others say with face value, without actually understanding trade offs.

derefr 7y ago

Fowler mostly just writes anthropologically about design patterns he encounters, explaining how to implement them given that you’ve decided to implement them. He says a lot of “you’ve got to do X”, but in the context of the article it means “evidence suggests that you’ve got to do X if you’re doing Y; otherwise, what you’re doing won’t be recognized as Y and people will get confused when you call it Y.” Fowler’s work is to software design-patterns as https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog is to English idioms: someone who provides analyses of what usages are accepted and why, and what usages will get your text a bemused eyebrow-raise. Robert C. Martin, meanwhile, is certainly paternalistic, but there’s a bit of lost context to his writings: they’re targeted at the army of “Java school” devs going directly from school to working at the big Java shops of the 90s. His advice actually works quite well if your goal is to bootstrap yourself from an education of “programming” but no “software engineering”, directly to being able to leave a large pre-existing Java codebase “better than you found it.” (His advice is no substitute for reading the code, absorbing the architecture, and then extending it in natural and intuitive ways—but 90s Java shops rarely gave their devs time to do that before moving them to the next project.)

smnplk 7y ago
Do not forget Fowlers twitter influences https://twitter.com/martinfowler/status/893100444507144192?lang=en https://twitter.com/martinfowler/status/893100444507144192?l...