>Sure, if you summarize the whole book as "keep things small with a single purpose" that's not an awful message, but that's not the book.

Assuming that you have read the book, I find it odd that you would consider that to be the steel-man a fan of this work would invent, it considers considerably more ground than that:

- Prioritise human-readability

- Use meaningful names

- Consistent formatting

- Quality comments

- Be DRY, stop copy-pasting

- Test

- SOLID

All aspects of programming, to this day, I routinely see done lazily and poorly. This rarely correlates with experience, and usually with aptitude.

>Clean Code has no nuance, only dogma, and that's a big problem (a point the second article I linked calls out and discusses in depth)

It's opinionated and takes it's line of reason to the Nth degree. We can all agree that the application of the rules require nuance and intelligence. The second article you linked is a lot more forgiving and pragmatic than your characterisation of the issue.

I would expect the entire industry to do a better job of picking apart and contextualising the work, after it made an impact on the industry, than the author himself could or ever will be capable of.

My main problem is the inanity of reactionary criticism which doesn't engage with the ideas. Is Clean Code responsible for a net negative effect on our profession, directly or indirectly? Are we correlating a negative trend in ability with the influence of this work? What exactly are "Dirty Code" mug salesmen proposing as an alternative; what are they even proposing as being the problem, other than the examples in CC are bad and it's easy to misapply it's principles?

>We can all agree that the application of the rules require nuance and intelligence

Except Uncle Bob, it seems, as evidenced by his code samples and his presentations in the years since that book came out. That's my objection. Many others have presented Bob's ideas better in the last 19 years. The book was good at the time, but we're a decade past when we should have stopped recommending it. Have folks go read Ousterhout instead - shorter, better, more durable.