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> What's going on with all the Uncle Bob hate nowadays? Sensible people have always hated him and his bullshit - what products has he ever produced? I remember

> What's going on with all the Uncle Bob hate nowadays? Sensible people have always hated him and his bullshit - what products has he ever produced? I remember when he started posting his nonsense on Stack Overflow - boy, did he run out of there with his tail between his legs.

jancsika 6y ago
Hm, I just checked the user page for an "Uncle Bob." It looks like he had 6 accepted answers out of a total of 10. On all but one of the accepted answers a lot of the comments are simply kudos. Plus on most of his non-accepted answers, he has comments thanking him for his answer. If I had judged StackOverflow by this user page alone, I would probably would have been persuaded to use StackOverflow. :) Where's the "tail between his legs" post you are referring to? https://stackoverflow.com/users/73476/uncle-bob https://stackoverflow.com/users/73476/uncle-bob
- zabzonk 6y ago
  > Where's the "tail between his legs" post you are referring to? I didn't mention a post. He came to stack overflow, posted a few answers for which he obviously expected instance acceptance, and then, once he realised that no-one particularly wanted anything to do with him, immediately disappeared.
  - jancsika 6y ago
    I don't find evidence for the claim that he expected instant acceptance for any of the posts he made. What's your evidence for that claim? I also don't find evidence that "no-one particularly wanted anything to do with him." Especially given that the majority of his answers were the accepted answer, why do you claim this? Finally, what's the relevance of him "immediately" ceasing his posts? Users of crowd-sourced services have all kinds of usage patterns for all kinds of reasons. Frankly, I find fatuous to notice a sudden lack of use and jump to the conclusion that it must be due to the user having been humiliated or shamed (which is what "tail between legs" refers to).
- rovolo 6y ago
  I'm guessing they're referring to the fact that he only answered questions from March to October 2009. That's a short time, but we shouldn't really expect people to donate time answering questions on SO either.
  - Jtsummers 6y ago
    TBF, I think a lot of us joined it in the early days, contributed a bit, found it not to our liking or that it wasn't where we wanted to spend a lot of time for some reason, and moved on. Someone moving on after a few, apparently, positive encounters doesn't really indicate anything other than that they moved on.
zarkov99 6y ago
Really? Is that you criteria for whether someone knows something worthwhile about programming? What did Stroustrup create? How about Dijsktra? Tannenbaun? Herb Sutter? There is more than one way to contribute to the advancement of the state of the art and Martin has done plenty to advance it.
- zabzonk 6y ago
  > What did Stroustrup create? Are you serious?
  - zarkov99 6y ago
    Maybe C++ could be considered a product, but that did not seem to be what the OP meant.
- buescher 6y ago
  I'll take Knuth's ideas on goto over Dijsktra's any day, not just because Knuth has been the better thinker and writer, but also because he wrote TeX and other software. Remember when structured programming was going to fix everything? Well, neither do I, but it still had a ton of momentum as a panacea when I was learning to program. Grown-ups with access to real computers would sniff at our BASIC machines and quote Djikstra at us.
eitland 6y ago
> Sensible people have always hated him Sensible people should have a rather high bar for hating people. > what products has he ever produced? His impact hasn't so much been physical products as teaching. He has taught a lot of useful stuff. For me there is one particular conference 12 or so years ago that I still thibk of again and again. It is about refactoring methods and it was brilliant and by following the resulting code becomes much easier to reason about. Some reason needs ro be applied, but less than if I hadn't learned those ideas.
dang 6y ago
Please don't post personal invective like this to HN. Maybe you don't owe $UNCLE any better, but you owe this community better if you're posting to it, because the global effect of this kind of thing is destructive of what we want HN to be. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

jancsika 6y ago

Hm, I just checked the user page for an "Uncle Bob." It looks like he had 6 accepted answers out of a total of 10. On all but one of the accepted answers a lot of the comments are simply kudos. Plus on most of his non-accepted answers, he has comments thanking him for his answer. If I had judged StackOverflow by this user page alone, I would probably would have been persuaded to use StackOverflow. :) Where's the "tail between his legs" post you are referring to? https://stackoverflow.com/users/73476/uncle-bob https://stackoverflow.com/users/73476/uncle-bob

zabzonk 6y ago
> Where's the "tail between his legs" post you are referring to? I didn't mention a post. He came to stack overflow, posted a few answers for which he obviously expected instance acceptance, and then, once he realised that no-one particularly wanted anything to do with him, immediately disappeared.
- jancsika 6y ago
  I don't find evidence for the claim that he expected instant acceptance for any of the posts he made. What's your evidence for that claim? I also don't find evidence that "no-one particularly wanted anything to do with him." Especially given that the majority of his answers were the accepted answer, why do you claim this? Finally, what's the relevance of him "immediately" ceasing his posts? Users of crowd-sourced services have all kinds of usage patterns for all kinds of reasons. Frankly, I find fatuous to notice a sudden lack of use and jump to the conclusion that it must be due to the user having been humiliated or shamed (which is what "tail between legs" refers to).
rovolo 6y ago
I'm guessing they're referring to the fact that he only answered questions from March to October 2009. That's a short time, but we shouldn't really expect people to donate time answering questions on SO either.
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  TBF, I think a lot of us joined it in the early days, contributed a bit, found it not to our liking or that it wasn't where we wanted to spend a lot of time for some reason, and moved on. Someone moving on after a few, apparently, positive encounters doesn't really indicate anything other than that they moved on.

zarkov99 6y ago

Really? Is that you criteria for whether someone knows something worthwhile about programming? What did Stroustrup create? How about Dijsktra? Tannenbaun? Herb Sutter? There is more than one way to contribute to the advancement of the state of the art and Martin has done plenty to advance it.

zabzonk 6y ago
> What did Stroustrup create? Are you serious?
- zarkov99 6y ago
  Maybe C++ could be considered a product, but that did not seem to be what the OP meant.
buescher 6y ago
I'll take Knuth's ideas on goto over Dijsktra's any day, not just because Knuth has been the better thinker and writer, but also because he wrote TeX and other software. Remember when structured programming was going to fix everything? Well, neither do I, but it still had a ton of momentum as a panacea when I was learning to program. Grown-ups with access to real computers would sniff at our BASIC machines and quote Djikstra at us.

eitland 6y ago

> Sensible people have always hated him Sensible people should have a rather high bar for hating people. > what products has he ever produced? His impact hasn't so much been physical products as teaching. He has taught a lot of useful stuff. For me there is one particular conference 12 or so years ago that I still thibk of again and again. It is about refactoring methods and it was brilliant and by following the resulting code becomes much easier to reason about. Some reason needs ro be applied, but less than if I hadn't learned those ideas.

dang 6y ago

Please don't post personal invective like this to HN. Maybe you don't owe $UNCLE any better, but you owe this community better if you're posting to it, because the global effect of this kind of thing is destructive of what we want HN to be. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html