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Comment by pbw | Hacker News Reader

> But performance isn’t the reason to reject his advice: common sense and good taste are more than enough of a reason.

My article and video are responses to Casey's mega-popular video "Clean Code Leads To Horrible Performance," which has 873k views. In it, he falsely claims that clean code always leads to horrible performance when, in fact, it only sometimes does. In my article/video, I explain when OOP/clean code does and doesn't lead to horrible performance.

My goal was to debunk Casey's claim since he was factually wrong and continues to mislead people about this to this day. I partially agree with your point that Uncle Bob's advice is wrong for other reasons. His main four books total 1,500 pages. Some of the advice is good, some is dated, opinionated, or just wrong. Untangling all that would require a much longer and very different article, which wasn't the one I was writing.

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I get that Casey’s video is popular (though I wouldn’t call a video with less than a couple million views in it’s first year mega-popular) but I also feel like it’s a bit of a straw man. People don’t dislike Clean Code because the examples aren’t performant, they dislike it because it very stridently and wrongly argues for ways of writing code that are difficult to read, reason about and work with.

And to save you a lot of time: Most of the pages Uncle Bob has written don’t matter. Clean Code was his only book that has significant sway over the software community at large, the other books didn’t have nearly as much influence and don’t really matter to the discussion.

Like, it doesn’t matter if Uncle Bob makes a good point in the middle of a forest when no one is there to hear it. The thing that matters is that he wrote a bad book that made the software engineering community worse.

I am sorry to be tangental, as I am not the GP of this comment thread.

However, I am just curious, since you seem to have a very rational opinion on this topic, what do you think about Domain-Driven Design?

It's not technically CA, but from what I have read, the two can commonly be found together.

My understanding that performance issues with DDD are also not a guarantee, but performance is often the first thing sacrificed in order to maintain "domain purity."

In other words, if you were to develop a size > medium project, what would you use as an architecture?

I only ask because I have been attempting to implement DDD after attempting CA, and I am not convinced the juice is worth the squeeze for either one of the patterns. I am not saying that either design pattern cannot work, but at the same time, I also wouldn't say that a Rube-Goldberg Machine cannot work either.

Uncle Bob: Thou shalt not denormalize your data!

Casey: Normalized data has an extreme overhead of recalculating things, it's horrible!

Reality: You look at the situation and decide when you need cached values to get acceptable performance. (And I consider most denormalized items in the database to be a form of cached value.)

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