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Comment by strict9 | Hacker News Reader

10 or so years ago when I first got into development I looked to people like Martin's for how I should write code.

But I had more and more difficulty reconciling bizarrely optimistic patterns with reality. This from the article perfectly sums it up:

>Martin says that functions should not be large enough to hold nested control structures (conditionals and loops); equivalently, they should not be indented to more than two levels.

Back then as now I could not understand how one person can make such confident and unambiguous statements about business logic across the spectrum of use cases and applications.

It's one thing to say how something should be written in ideal circumstances, it's another to essentially say code is spaghetti garbage because it doesn't precisely align to a very specific dogma.

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This is the point that I have the most trouble understanding in critiques of Fowler, Bob, and all writers who write about coding: in my reading, I had always assumed that they were writing about the perfect-world ideal that needs to be balanced with real-world situations. There's a certain level of bluster and over-confidence required in that type of technical writing that I understood to be a necessary evil in order to get points across. After all, a book full of qualifications will fail to inspire confidence in its own advice.

This is true only for people first coming to development. If you're just starting your journey, you are likely looking for quantifiable absolutes as to what is good and what isn't.

After you're a bit more seasoned, I think qualified comments are probably far more welcome than absolutes.

> After all, a book full of qualifications will fail to inspire confidence in its own advice.

I don't think that's true at all. One of the old 'erlang bibles' is "learn you some erlang" and it full of qualifications titled "don't drink the kool-aid" (notably not there in the haskell inspiration for the book). It does not fail to inspire confidence to have qualifications scattered throughout and to me it actually gives me MORE confidence that the content is applicable and the tradeoffs are worth it.

https://learnyousomeerlang.com/introduction#about-this-tutor...

Can you provide a source where he said that? Or did he actually say something more like "thats when I consider refactoring it"?

My recollection of the clean code book and Fowler books were very much “I think these are smells, but smells in the code are also fine”

Note: Robert Martin and Martin Fowler are different people. Are you saying Fowler said this?

It's directly from the article, and Clean Code was one of the first books I purchased.

Fixed the typo, thanks.

The article is not written by Robert Martin, so that doesn’t necessarily establish he said that. You also implied Fowler said it. Thanks for clarifying.

I believe Robert Martin did say this, but there was probably a preface from the book that didn’t make it into the article, so the quote in the article may be a bit out of context.

    Now, some people will claim that having 8-character indentations makes
    the code move too far to the right, and makes it hard to read on a
    80-character terminal screen.  The answer to that is that if you need
    more than 3 levels of indentation, you're screwed anyway, and should fix
    your program.

https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/process/coding-styl...

All codebases are spaghetti garbage, but some are useful.

> it's another to essentially say code is spaghetti garbage because it doesn't precisely align to a very specific dogma

Does it say that though?

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