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If you read Uncle Bob’s post he does say “tools are fine” and that he’s invested in them too. What’s so bad with adding discipline into the mix too?
by jbjbjbjb 6y ago
If you read Uncle Bob’s post he does say “tools are fine” and that he’s invested in them too.
What’s so bad with adding discipline into the mix too?
- Jach 6y agoThe underlying point people miss is that you might have the best tool in the world, but without any discipline to start using it and continue using it, it will go unused. Discipline matters. Edit: relevant to the other thread, this is a pattern with writings about Uncle Bob. When you read him directly disagreements are usually not so clear-cut as detractors make them. Clean Code is the tech book that I've argued with most, still worth reading, as opposed to certain other tech books. But I grant that he expresses himself increasingly poorly when moving from books to blogs to tweets, and even his books are written in a 'school of martial arts' style (admitted to in the preface/intros), i.e. presenting His Way without the side detours into alternatives and innumerable context-sensitive exceptions. This makes it easy to mischaracterize him as saying things like "don't ever comment code, comments are bad!" but if you read his book/code you will in fact find some comments. Perhaps his beliefs are slightly more nuanced?
- buescher 6y agoI'm sure they are. He makes his living as a software process consultant, right? And the author of the original article is right: Bob Martin is dismissive of tools that aren't unit tests, and "discipline" in Bob's article is the discipline to... write unit tests. Your "underlying point" is just making an uninteresting truism out of a more specific argument.
- aidenn0 6y agoI mean I'm not a fan of Strunk and White either, and the fact that E.B. White often violated the rules from Strunk and White to good effect when writing his own prose doesn't redeem the book, if anything it damns it.