For an example of what happens when he runs into a real programmer see:

https://github.com/johnousterhout/aposd-vs-clean-code

_A Philosophy of Software Design_ is an amazing and under-rated book:

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/39996759-a-philosophy...

and one which I highly recommend and which markedly improved my code --- the other book made me question my boss's competence when it showed up on his desk, but then it was placed under a monitor as a riser which reflected his opinion of it....

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jcranmer 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

That entire conversation on comments is just wildly insane. Uncle Bob outright admits that he couldn't understand the code he had written when he looked back on it for the discussion, which should be an automatic failure. But he tries to justify the failure as merely the algorithm just being sooooo complex there's no way it can be done simply. (Which, compared to the numerics routines I've been staring out, no, this is among the easiest kind of algorithm to understand)

	▲	tptacek 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		The whole thing is really uncomfortable; it's as if, after attempting the sudoku solver, Ron Jeffries sat down for a discussion with Peter Norvig, who was not especially diplomatic about the outcome of the experiment. The section before that, where they're talking about the "decomposition" of Knuth's simple primality tester, is brutal. "Looping over odd numbers is one concern; determining primality is another".

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hyperman1 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's a really interesting read. I felt myself being closer to John about the small method part, but closer to UB for the TDD part, even if in both cases I was somewhere inbetween.

At the very least, you convinced me to add John's book to my ever-growing reading list.

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onionisafruit 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Each page in that book serves its purpose. That purpose is raising the monitor 0.1mm.