Comment by theflyinghorse
5 years ago
Robert Martin and his aura always struck me as odd. In part because of how revered he always was at organizations I worked. Senior developers would use his work to end arguments, and many code reviews discussions would be judged by how closely they adhere to Clean Code.
Of course reading Clean Code left me more confused than enlightened due precisely to what he presents as good examples of Code. The author of the article really does hit the nail on the head about Martin's code style - it's borderline unreadable a lot of times.
Who the f. even is Robert Martin?! What has he built? As far as I am able to see he is famous and revered because he is famous and revered.
I think part of his appeal lies in his utter certainty that he is correct. This is also the problem with him.
He ran a consultancy and knew how to pump out books into a world of programmers that wanted books
I was around in the early 90s through to the early 2000s when a lot of the ideas came about slowly got morphed by consultants who were selling this stuff to companies as essentially "religion". The nuanced thoughts of a lot of the people who had most of the original core ideas is mostly lost.
It's a tricky situation, at the core of things, there are some really good ideas, but the messaging by people like "uncle bob" seem to fail to communicate the mindset in a way that develops thinking programmers. Mainly because him, and people like Ron Jerfferies, really didn't actually build anything serious once they became consultants and started giving out all these edicts. If you watched them on forums/blogs at the time, they were really not that good. There were lots of people who were building real things and had great perspectives, but their nuanced perspectives were never really captured into books, and it would be hard to as it is more about the mentality of using ideas and principles and making good pragmatic choices and adapting things and not being limited by "rules" but about incorporating the essence of the ideas into your thinking processes.
So many of those people walked away from a lot of those communities when it morphed into "Agile" and started being dominated by the consultants.