Hacker News Reader

Comment by dimgl | Hacker News Reader

I've seen this sentiment more and more recently. This sentiment is shared with books like Clean Code, which, when I first heard this, was shocking. Clean Code was one of the best books I ever read on programming, and at the time was hugely influential to my career growth. In fact, it helped me so much that I was able to uplevel other engineers by mentorship at several organizations that I've worked at.

That being said, there have been some great critiques of these books and it's kept me wondering if maybe I'm misremembering these books for what they were. Here's a critique on Clean Code: https://qntm.org/clean

Has it really been that long? Are these books really this outdated now? I saw a similar thread on Reddit recently and the alternative they recommended was this book... https://sandimetz.com/99bottles I've read only a couple of chapters, and I'm struggling to see why this book is so much better. Anyone have any opinions on this?

View on HN

People in general are bad in dealing with nuance. And there is enough of it in these type of books for some to overheat.

Nuance may leave a good feeling with the one reader. Black and white however will make your post go so much further as it either enrages or wins accolades and really who cares if it just gets forwarded and promoted and with it your name.

I wouldn't lump The Pragmatic Programmer together with Clean Code. Bob Martin is notoriously dogmatic about just about everything he says. The Pragmatic Programmer, on the other hand, was the book that first exposed me to the idea that there are principles that are good in general, but it's also good to know when and how to violate them.

IMO many programmers simply don't like Clean Code because their greybeard mentors have been bothering them with it too much. They want something fresh and new, something that makes them feel they understand software development better than most of their peers including their mentors.

Clean Code was horribly dogmatic. He would lay down "laws" that were actually trade offs that worked well for him in specific instances in the past, blithely lacking understanding of the context that made them work.

The danger with Clean Code is that a lot of the advice would work a lot of the time so it's very easy to think it's exactly on point right up until it guides you face first into a brick wall.

Except it isn’t dogmatic. Re-read chapter 1 where they write that there is not One True Way and advise the reader to go find other sources along with reading their own book. That is not something dogmatic writers would include.

Yeah, then skip to the chapter on TDD where he lists the "laws" :/

Again, read the first chapter. A dogmatic text would not tell you to go find and study other sources and develop your own path. That they then tell you their ideas in an opinionated fashion is not in (total) conflict with that sentiment.

The claims of dogma are, in my opinion, grossly exaggerated and a consequence of people failing to read (or failing to comprehend) the authors' own caveats in chapter 1. If they didn't include those statements in chapter one, maybe I'd agree with you. I still wouldn't discard the text out of hand, because, you know we have brains and can think critically and read a text to evaluate it ourselves.

(I say "authors" because Bob Martin was the primary author, several chapters are written by other people.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com