Comment by ad_hockey

Something I find odd about Uncle Bob's style is the preference for reading and modifying shared state over pure functions that take args. It makes me do a double take when I read a method registerTheCandidateAsPrime() (taken from UB's rewrite) that doesn't take a candidate arg.

How would you unit test those methods? You'd have to directly set the field values, then call the method, then assert on the fields. If the answer is "you don't unit test private methods" then that's completely fine, because I agree with that (perhaps this is implicit from the private keyword, I don't know Java). But I'm struggling to imagine how you would get to those private methods with such a strict adherence to TDD as Bob recommends. Methods like increaseEachPrimeMultipleToOrBeyondCandidate() are quite complex, and would be tricky to build up using TDD if you couldn't exercise them directly.

If nothing else, surely Bob's approach is not thread safe. Call PrimeGenerator3.generateFirstNPrimes() concurrently and they'll trample all over each other. John Ousterhout's stateless version doesn't have that problem.