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Compared to someone like DHH, Uncle Bob has very little practical experience. Even without comparing him to DHH, there is hardly anything that we can look at to

Compared to someone like DHH, Uncle Bob has very little practical experience. Even without comparing him to DHH, there is hardly anything that we can look at to measure Uncle Bob's experience besides Fitnesse (which is a very, very messy code base). On top of that, Uncle Bob has a vested financial interest in TDD because he's a consultant who makes money off it. Finally, Uncle Bob has a history of claiming things without backing them up and just expecting the world to believe him. "TDD is the only way to write good software" is one of these claims that is finally being challenged. It's about time.

parasubvert 13y ago
"Compared to someone like DHH, Uncle Bob has very little practical experience." Are you even joking? Bob Martin starting programming about 45 years ago, 9 years before DHH was even born. I remember having discussions with the man about software design almost 20 years ago on USEnet when I was in college. The dude has being doing this stuff for a long, long time. He wrote THE book on object-oriented design principles. He was one of the original Agile guys. You can't just look to open source projects as a judge of someone's output over decades, Github didn't even exist 6 years ago. DHH is using strong language to make people think about aspects of TDD that have gone awry. Just as Bob uses strong language to make people think about testing. The intent was to foster a debate, which has worked. This won't mark the end of TDD, just rethinking about how far we design our code for testing.
- laureny 13y ago
  You are confusing "Having been around for a while" with "Having practical experience". Uncle Bob has been a consultant for a very, very long time and living off articles, presentations and books on the topic of software engineering. He has much more practice talking and consulting about these things than actually writing code in the industry.
  - kasey_junk 13y ago
    Not that I think that ad hominem attacks are a good way to settle this particular debate, but most of what you are complaining about can be directly applied to DHH as well. That's the nature of ad hominems. They don't really get to the heart of the problem.
  - parasubvert 13y ago
    Bob is a consultant who codes, and coaches those who code, and has a long track record of doing so. Not only are you making an ad hominem argument, you're completely discounting the experience of one of the giants of our field. Only HN.

parasubvert 13y ago

"Compared to someone like DHH, Uncle Bob has very little practical experience." Are you even joking? Bob Martin starting programming about 45 years ago, 9 years before DHH was even born. I remember having discussions with the man about software design almost 20 years ago on USEnet when I was in college. The dude has being doing this stuff for a long, long time. He wrote THE book on object-oriented design principles. He was one of the original Agile guys. You can't just look to open source projects as a judge of someone's output over decades, Github didn't even exist 6 years ago. DHH is using strong language to make people think about aspects of TDD that have gone awry. Just as Bob uses strong language to make people think about testing. The intent was to foster a debate, which has worked. This won't mark the end of TDD, just rethinking about how far we design our code for testing.

laureny 13y ago
You are confusing "Having been around for a while" with "Having practical experience". Uncle Bob has been a consultant for a very, very long time and living off articles, presentations and books on the topic of software engineering. He has much more practice talking and consulting about these things than actually writing code in the industry.
- kasey_junk 13y ago
  Not that I think that ad hominem attacks are a good way to settle this particular debate, but most of what you are complaining about can be directly applied to DHH as well. That's the nature of ad hominems. They don't really get to the heart of the problem.
- parasubvert 13y ago
  Bob is a consultant who codes, and coaches those who code, and has a long track record of doing so. Not only are you making an ad hominem argument, you're completely discounting the experience of one of the giants of our field. Only HN.