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I find all the programming advice espoused by all these "gurus" to be very suspect. Especially since most of them seem to come from a theory vs practice POV. Fo

I find all the programming advice espoused by all these "gurus" to be very suspect. Especially since most of them seem to come from a theory vs practice POV. For example "uncle bob" delivers a lot of his advice as gospel, but has he actually successfully delivered any software that's used at scale? Same with Martin Fowler et al. I've found advice by people like Linus Torvalds, Steve Yegge, etc. much more interesting/insightful/useful. I've especially found anyone that is an "enterprise architectural consultant" to be especially suspect.

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simplotek 4y ago
> For example "uncle bob" delivers a lot of his advice as gospel, but has he actually successfully delivered any software that's used at scale? I fail to the the point in this cheap ad-hominem. Uncle Bob is arguably best known by his seminal books: Clean Code, and Clean Architecture. Clean Code talks about principles such as "you should name your variables well". Why do you believe scale is any relevant? Clean Architecture talks about a general principle to organize software projects which has traits that are highly benefitial to maintenance, refactoring, and even re extensability. It's a nuanced take on the tried and true layered architecture. Why do you believe scale is remotely relevant? I know personally Principal Engineers of a couple of FANGS who are great at selling ideas but are outright awful at writing code. One even famously handed POCs to SDE1s to have them rewrite and refactor his code to get some quality in it. Do you really believe in this appeal to authority fallacy to the point where the number of customers hitting a server are the measuring stick for competence and the quality of implementations?
- theLiminator 4y ago
  Cuz they espouse advice without having proven it in practice. When I say at scale, I mean they literally haven't shipped any software of note, I don't mean software that's getting hit by an arbitrary number of req/s. Why I think this matters? They haven't demonstrated that their rather arbitrary list of Good Things help make successful software. Also, some of the advice is just provably nonsensical. Like "uncle" bob says the "ideal argument's number for a function is zero (niladic function)" which is absurd. It either means your function is impure, or is literally a constant. Most of it is just very shallow stuff that's mostly applicable to Java/C#/OO languages. A lot of the patterns might even be considered antipatterns in other languages. I just don't find stuff written by these guys very insightful or useful.

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simplotek 4y ago

> For example "uncle bob" delivers a lot of his advice as gospel, but has he actually successfully delivered any software that's used at scale? I fail to the the point in this cheap ad-hominem. Uncle Bob is arguably best known by his seminal books: Clean Code, and Clean Architecture. Clean Code talks about principles such as "you should name your variables well". Why do you believe scale is any relevant? Clean Architecture talks about a general principle to organize software projects which has traits that are highly benefitial to maintenance, refactoring, and even re extensability. It's a nuanced take on the tried and true layered architecture. Why do you believe scale is remotely relevant? I know personally Principal Engineers of a couple of FANGS who are great at selling ideas but are outright awful at writing code. One even famously handed POCs to SDE1s to have them rewrite and refactor his code to get some quality in it. Do you really believe in this appeal to authority fallacy to the point where the number of customers hitting a server are the measuring stick for competence and the quality of implementations?

theLiminator 4y ago
Cuz they espouse advice without having proven it in practice. When I say at scale, I mean they literally haven't shipped any software of note, I don't mean software that's getting hit by an arbitrary number of req/s. Why I think this matters? They haven't demonstrated that their rather arbitrary list of Good Things help make successful software. Also, some of the advice is just provably nonsensical. Like "uncle" bob says the "ideal argument's number for a function is zero (niladic function)" which is absurd. It either means your function is impure, or is literally a constant. Most of it is just very shallow stuff that's mostly applicable to Java/C#/OO languages. A lot of the patterns might even be considered antipatterns in other languages. I just don't find stuff written by these guys very insightful or useful.