Crucial context here: Ousterhout is one of the great programmers who built the free software world we live in today, and Uncle Bob is a faker. Ousterhout is not without his problems (Stallman famously called him a "parasite" on the free software community, as well as fervently disagreeing with his technical taste) but he's written truly world-changing software. By contrast, Uncle Bob is a windbag book author who has never managed to write any software worth using, to my knowledge.

Ousterhout to Uncle Bob:

> maybe you were surprised that it is hard to understand, but I am not. Said another way, if you are unable to predict whether your code will be easy to understand, there are problems with your design methodology.

This debate is full of treasures like this. What a brilliantly clear and understated way to expose charlatanism!

What is this “world-changing software” I'm saying Ousterhout has shipped? Tcl. (Hold on, now, don't downvote just yet.) Tcl has been a crucial enabling technology for EDA and automated regression testing since literally the 01980s. Probably every VLSI chip in the computer you're reading this on was designed, verified, and tested with workflows involving unholy amounts of Tcl. GCC's test suite is also Tcl. Still.

Automated testing in the 01980s? Yes. It's true that automated testing wasn't very prevalent in the software world until the Agile guys (Uncle Bob and his less incompetent compatriots) popularized it around the turn of the century, but EEs and compiler engineers have been pervasively automating testing a lot longer than that, and Tcl was for a long time the least awful option, believe it or not. And that was John Ousterhout's doing.

Do you know what the SPICE developers did to make SPICE scriptable, before there was Tcl? They linked csh into it. Motherfucking csh. If you've never tried to maintain a large script in csh, you do not know the meaning of suffering.

Good programmers write good software; bad programmers write bad software, or no software. Ousterhout has written one of the few pieces of software that can be called great. (In its historical context. In 01978 csh was great software too.) What software has Uncle Bob written?

Listening to Uncle Bob's programming advice over Ousterhout's would be like listening to your middle-school English teacher's writing advice instead of Stephen King's. It's not that King could never give you worse advice, but if you need your English teacher's advice, generally your judgment will not be good enough to distinguish the rare occasions King gets it wrong.