Man, the guy pissed me off. He seemed quite strident in this "software craftmanship" schtick.
As it turns out, I had written an article on all the horrible ways companies implement Agile. It's gotten to the point that I cringe whenever I hear the word "Agile", and I consider myself an Agile Technical Coach. Orgs just really suck at trying to do better. Most of the time it ends up in a micromanagement death march.
Bob read this. It pissed him off.
So Bob and I met online by pissing one another off. We commented on each other's works, and over the years, we've become friends. So I speak both as a coder, a consumer, friend, and a fellow talking head.
Bob means well, but with a large audience people tend to read into his work things that aren't there. This is the HN effect: with a large enough audience nothing you say or write will be immune from misunderstanding. He also tends to overstate his case from time-to-time, like we all do. Hyperbole is a useful rhetorical tool.
I restate his thesis in my own words as such: The number one problem in software today is hidden complexity, mutability, and state. When programmers enter a new domain, they naturally tend to "help" follow-on programmers by creating abstractions on top of whatever complexity they find. This increases, rather than decreases the hidden-state-mutability-complexity problem. It gives the appearance of being useful, but in fact can do more harm than good. Focusing on the tools instead of doing a good job gives this wonderful rosy picture of progress when in fact you're headed in the other direction.
It's not that tools are bad. It's that our natural inclination to add in abstractions easily leads to code where it's more important than ever to thoroughly test exactly what the code does. If we focused on the testing part first, the tools part wouldn't be an issue. But instead we focus on tools and schedule pressure, and this leads to total crap. We buy the tools/framework because we believe that schedule pressure forces us to work "at a higher level" but instead that same pressure, combined with the cognitive diffculties of adding yet more layers to the problems leads to a worse state of affairs than if we had simply skipped the tools to begin with.
I'll never forget the shocking wakeup I got as a developer when I realized I am a market for people selling me stuff, and these people do not have the interests of my clients in mind. They only have to sell me, not provide value.
And yes, you can argue that there's a requirements problem, but whenever something goes wrong, isn't there always a requirements problem? Nobody ever asks for a system that's broken, so whenever a system is broken, you can say "But you never told me not to do X" and be correct. The fact that requirements are a problem is tautological.
I stood before a sea of programmers a few days ago. I asked them the question I always ask: “How many of you write unit tests on a regular basis?” Not one in twenty raised their hands.
Bob's right. When you see results like this, stay away from as many tools as you can at all costs. You don't give hand grenades to infants, and programmers who aren't testing don't need faster ways to complexify the system in non-intuitive ways. The mistake this author makes is not realizing the reasons unit testing and TDD keep getting more important year-by-year. The mistake Bob makes is not diving down deep enough for some readers. "Craftsmanship" is a fine label, but there's a reason we need this stuff aside from just wanting to be professionals. If more folks understood the practical and pragmatic reasons for the zeal, there'd be less confusion.