Comment by rester324

9 months ago

Uncle Bob is one of the core contributors to Fitnesse, which had moderate success in the Java popularity era back in the day.

Also, you do understand that people worked as software engineers even before Github became popular, or open sourcing to begin with, do you? So if someone is 60+ year old, chances are that most of his work has never been open sourced, and his work was targeting use cases, platforms, services which have no utility in this age any more.

Which have all nothing to do with how good a software engineer someone is.

And finally, do you have any proof that he never shipped any code into production?

> So if someone is 60+ year old, chances are that most of his work has never been open sourced,

John Ousterhout is 70 years old and one of the open source pioneers. We don't know what Uncle Bob shipped or did not ship but his friendly opponent in this discussion definitley did ship high profile projects.

  • I'm 72. As for what I have shipped over the half-century of my career, you can read all about that in part two of my book We, Programmers. Suffice it to say I've shipped a LOT of code.

The criticism was that UB worked at a company that allegedly didn’t ship code to production, not that he doesn’t have a corpus of open source projects on GitHub.

> So if someone is 60+ year old, chances are that most of his work has never been open source

Somewhat ageist? I'm 72 and have produced a number of FOSS tools.

  • Truly. I know plenty of people in their 60s and 70s who use Git and are still very sharp programmers.

    • Using Git is unrelated to whether the software you write is proprietary or open-source.