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Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

I just think - in the book at least - he has really bad taste. The examples are full of “spooky action at a distance”. He writes the exact sort of class functions that make a lot of OO terrible to work with, where a function that should be pure has some weird hidden side effects. Code like that is really difficult to reason about and impossible to reuse safely. Somewhat ironic, given what he preaches in the rest of the book.

I really like that he brings attention to the idea that code can be beautiful. But judging by his examples, he just seems to have no idea how to actually write beautiful software himself.

I wish he went off and learned some functional programming. Haskell, Erlang, Clojure, F#. Something like that. Really go deep. If you want to know what really beautiful software looks like, that’s the place. Those communities know beauty.

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The ugly reality is consultants like Martin have little production coding experience. Martin has posts going back to the early 90s showing he had little understanding of how software teams work and deliver value.

From what I have seen, his ideas were formed in a vacuum divorced from real coding. You can see it in the small amounts of open source he has released. The kind of guy who will always prefer 50 classes to 5. Who clutches his pearls at an if statement.

I remember he was invited to give a talk at Bloomberg and the majority of us were simply disgusted that an obvious hack like him was lecturing a group of software engineers who had really been there and done that.

Those who can't do, teach.

I hate that phrase. There are billions of people who can't code and also aren't teaching it. And plenty of people who are good at something and enjoy giving back and sharing in the form of teaching.

I really enjoy the somewhat sarcastic retort. Those who can’t teach: don’t.

I prefer the version attributed to Aristotle: "Those who can, do; those who understand, teach"

A good teacher needs a deep understanding of their topic, often deeper that that required to be a do-er only.

This comment cannot be overstated. Armchair "software engineers" like them do a lot of disservice to the community by promoting non-workable solutions in real production environments.

On the other side, I still consider McConnell's Code Complete to be a gem.

You mean Clojure, and he did. He is very enthusiastic about it, vastly preferring it to Java.

Fyi.

Fixed! And I'm glad to hear it. If his blog is anything to go by, it looks like he was messing around in clojure in about 2019, 12 years after he wrote Clean Code.

Maybe we'll see an updated version some day, with better examples. It would be valuable if only so people would stop trying to defend his old, bad advice.

It was updated and the second edition was published last year. I have not read it so have no idea what changed and what did not.

your opinion is no less valid than his. you see the problem if you use the word clean or beautiful. its opinions. so people will debate it till no end. it matters nothing at all.

I don't think beauty in code is entirely subjective. Beautiful code is like beautiful mathematics. Simple, clean, and correct by construction. All at once. There's plenty of ways to implement a graphics engine, web browser, database or OS kernel. Some of them are simpler, faster and more correct. And some approaches will inexorably lead you to a bug ridden mess.

You see this clearly if you ever teach. I would give all my students the same spec. Some students submitted small, simple programs which passed all the tests with flying colours. Some students would submit huge programs which barely worked.

As Alan Kay said once, the right point of view (on a problem) is worth 50 IQ points. At the margins there's subjectivity and tradeoffs. But lots of programs are more or - more often - much less beautiful.

Yeah - I mostly watched his videos (the first N of them), and liked it. But later I saw examples from his book and they were terrible.

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