I Interviewed Uncle Bob 

Uncle Prime and the Bogagen, the crossover we really needed.

Yeah, especially after Prime admitted going from full on Clean Coder disciple to "this is bs, be pragmatic".

I’m surprised that the neck beard hasn’t taken over, it is the usual pattern of older programmers.

Yo, doesnt debug. TDD

the power of unit tests

His grooming routine is as clean as his code.

@@myhstic no, he's busy creating pattern for us

Yesss, we need Martin F!

Absolutely not, too soon. I need at least a year to recover.

But I think Prime likes Fowler, he even applies Folwer's rule of three

Martin Fowler would NOT fuck around.

@@DudeWatIsThis then he would never find out

And inefficient coder. Over abstraction is also a sin.

Idk it seemed kinda DRY

So you're saying you wanna KISS them

oof.. this comment section smells

There seems to be a pattern in the comments.

you have adhd sir

To me the laughing sounded kind of forced I think he knows that he's in a space which looks very critical about his books.

@@blubblurb He's just jolly! With so much experience he is just a little bit jaded and knows life isn't about being right. Gotta laugh too

@@blubblurb I've seen him give talks. That's just how he is.

@@memoryman51 Ok, good to know.

Bob is very reasonable and I respect his efforts trying to "model" good practices into what he calls "clean code". I don't necessarily agree with all of it, but nevertheless, I think there is value in organizing these ideas into a book back in the day. One should remember that "Clean Code" and "Design Patterns" were written many years ago with many points that don't exactly translate to languages/practices we have now-a-days. I feel that people who "hate" his ideas are too dogmatic in the sense that you either agree with something 100% or you have to disagree 100% and hate it. Most things in life are not as black and white. Even Agile, if you are old enough to have experience with a "waterfall-like" process, you know how the agile manifesto had a positive impact. Of course, like most things, people try to make it into a business (scrum) and the whole thing gets distorted. I think Scrum sucks, (and I prefer to stick to the manifesto principles) but it's much better than the old waterfall approach.

Maybe because he didn't ask if he still thinks that women are supposedly less qualified to be software engineers than men

​@@Wyvernnnn do you seriously think that everyone would take one difference of opinions that radically? Defineatly no.

@@symix. That's not just any opinion. So yes; I would hope the large majority of software engineers would have that kind of critical thinking & backbone.

People don't like Bob because most of his "nuance" is him squirming when people have objections to his dogma which somehow isn't dogma but at the same time kinda is, unless he's in a "conversation".

@@y00t00b3r Omg mald harder

@@y00t00b3r I did not see that at all in the interview. Prime clearly had disagreements and things he agreed with, but asked him some clear explicit questions and received clear responses. I found the discussion about testing to be insightful and will be using Bob's philosophy going forward.

​@@y00t00b3r Yes this must be it. I only realized it when I started reading his blog by the way

​@@y00t00b3r what I got from this interview is, this isn't dogma. It's his personal preference. Clean Code is his daydreaming in the sense of him thinking about things that satisfy him which is why he comes off as dogmatic and simplistic. There is no real discussion or nuance in describing your favorite taste, you just say it to be that way. But when faced with reality he changes, as everyone does when they snap out of those daydreams. Doesn't mean those daydreams are somehow changed by reality, or that he's lying. It''s just reality is one thing, and our fantasies about simple joyful scenarios where we slay dragons in just the right way with our favorite power move and everyone claps is a different thing

LISP and FORTRAN are based

Uncle Bob is right, the first step on how to do proper Java is to ditch it and do Clojure.

If you want to write good software (not scripts and macros), then it is easiest to use a language that detects errors when the code is written, not when it is running. Nothing beats Rust from that perspective.

​@@CalifornianViking I am so so, so god damn tired of hearing the same BS from people who haven't even written a medium sized Rust project. Stop. Rust is no magic bullet. It DOES NOT PREVENT BUGS AT COMPILE-TIME. It might make it slightly harder compared to certain languages, but that's it. And the hell r you smoking to even say nothing beats Rust WHEN there are languages like Idris with totality checking and proof checkers.

Before Java, he was a huge C++ advocate, and OOPs guy. People evolve. This is a good thing.

It's his uncle, right?

🤣

Honestly good. They will learn quick why he is so influential or at least recognizable in the field.

Imagine being a software engineer and not knowing who he is.

Can't a guy interview his diddling uncle in peace?

Are we on a first name basis now? I don't want people to know my first name!

Ok boomer

I read it five years ago. Your comment makes me want to read it again

@@radicalchange9403 it's worth a read. just don't chug a 2L of coolaid after

I'll read it if they make a version in C++

This should be obvious at first for any intelligent reader that got one of his books....

or a smell that you're trying to understand the "how" where you need to know the "what" and move on

this happens all the time with OOP where people add a lot of state to the class, they have these "small functions" but the "small functions" are actually mutating any of the 10 properties in the class (you don't know until you read them, also you have to memorize what each small function is doing to get an understanding of their effect when called sequentially)

​@@josevargas686 Yeh, I think this is where programming languages themselves fall short. The function signature becomes obsolete when you start changing state within the class containing that function. As a personal preference, I try to minimize mutability, employ the single responsibility principle, and have clear names that indicate what state is changing and how it is changing. By doing so, I can minimize the number of tests I run against my own short term memory (which is bad) 🤣

You can use tuples and either types to split up functions more easily btw...

lol that's cap

@@laden6675 no, he did a good job. he led bob to build his own arguments even when he disagrees with them. this comes from a person who is highly critical of prime in many instances.

He didn't say it was a failure. He said he occasionally uses it. My team uses UML occasionally but not for everything

Trying to auto-generate code from just UML is a failure. Though, knowing how to draw a UML diagram, how to read one, and how to think about different aspects of a software system with UML diagrams - seem like good skills. Are you using those skills 100% of the time - no. Though, if your reaction to any UML diagram is: "I have never seen this before in my life."..

UML wastes your time. You would better use your time by going directly from story point to code, as code is the best diagram. It would be like drawing a pixel perfect mock up in figma, then converting it to Next.js, then oh no you have to change something, then you change it in code but it isn't up to date in UML. So you literally just did double work for no benefit. UML is garbage, just like OOP itself.

​@@Nellak2011 respectfully, you just might have been presented with a challenging enough problem yet

When I was in school, they still taught us the Structured Program Theorem, though OO was starting to take hold and Lisp was still hovering around.

I feel like most people haven’t even read his books but will openly disagree with him lol

@@aaronvancuren7946 it's very clear once they start their arguments 😂.

Most of all, he did not create many of these ideas. He just groups them together and re-explains what he learned from others. To talk to one another is to discover how little you know. It's a thoughtful direction for Prime to go into to bring such a guest on and dedicate an entire hour to. I truly think that his separation from the business world, like Netflix, has given him a clearer viewpoint on many matters as of late.

It is was my point of view comment before😊 Maybe it is because lot of people starting programming as the first subject. I starting coding to automate electronic process. So, programming to my understand doesnt has standard and focus on my business model and try apply the best pratices.

well, when everyone always points at 3 massively authoritarian and capital driven countries as "communism", it does get pretty grating. the joke is funny tho.

I don't know Bob's viewpoint on communism, but I certainly can see it as an insult to compare the work of engineers to what many Americans (especially older Americans) consider a failed ideology. A bit tasteless even in jest.

Coming from an American-based commentator (Prime) this is rather sad TBH, since most people in the USA have been so politically-abused by rhetoric they have little to no clue about the history and variation in this family of ideas.

Always be suspicious of things with the word manifesto attached to it.

​@@hemmper IIRC the "manifesto" in early programming culture was an explicit reference to/joke about the communist manifesto, in the sense of "hey, don't take this *that* seriously", but of course people did. I can't speak to how serious the agile manifesto was about the usage, though!

Agreed.

So glad someone said this. Small functions don't lead to the problem people fear they will.

I think the problem comes in when for whatever reason you *can't* trust the abstractions and have to figure out what it's really doing.

@@xthebumpx yes, you will need to drill down at this point, but usually only a small part is broken, so you don’t have the huge tree explosion Primeagen is talking about. If you have half decent debugging, you should be able to pinpoint the source pretty quickly. The issue here is was talking about was more trying to understand a new piece of code. I think the breaking it down can make that easier, of course, only if it’s done well.

Exactly. You put a comment on every third line, then turn the comments into function splits. And add a function that's the table of contents, calling them.

And it was an hour of uncle bob memeing on prime

That feel when you like a person whose work you hate

Just because he's "wrong," doesn't mean he's a bad person... There are a LOT of things that he's right about, not necessarily clean code though...

Because he's right with most of it

It's like difference between saying "I have a Honda" vs "I have a SUV" - some cars are just SUVs and if you use that that term for your car you avoid much confusion and you also introduce a lot less noise to your message.

@@prooseeIt's actually a funny example since Honda is more specific than SUV regarding a subset of car properties, but less specific regarding the diff between SUVs and other cars. It depends on the context which one is more useful and if you can just use both in different contexts, really shows the power of proper design.

@@Asto508 that's what I was aiming for: in programming the most specific thing is the code itself, but if you can communicate the general structure of your code just by saying a name of design pattern then sometimes it is specific enough your colleague doesn't need to dive into code.

Occuring patterns means skill issue, magic is out of our control and it tastes delicious

people often don't have to understand them because many of them are just language features these days. the GOF didn't build the book to be a perfect crystal to last for eternity. they said "this is what we've got so far. now it's your turn. show me what you got". and the cults built fake airstrips and fake airplanes out of wood because they hoped more planes would come.

Couldn't agree more. I believe in pseudo TDD. It is my approach to rapidly developing closed utility functions. Yet best lightly applied when free-form carving things out, where it might instigate diminishing returns when it forces you to refactor the tests as you go or worse influences the subject code itself. I think the sentiment he expresses holds true: use the principles to help drive pragmatism.

That's really good. I'm stealing it.

You need an evangelist to spread it so people can accept it

@@ghun131 sounds dirty

Too accurate lmao

Frameworks are literally abstractions that someone else created. You people come up with the dumbest reasoning.

Often its not increasing complexity its actually the opposite. Its often about normalising the approach so that people can more quickly grok whats happening in your codebase.

Patterns - reliable, proven approach to solve some problem. Also consistency with other parts might be valid point. What about the requirements? Maybe there is something than you miss and the pattern is addressing what you missed? I prefer consistency and similarity over constant reinventing the wheel, with new bugs, new issues, new "oh, I didn't thought about that". Also keep in mind: you read the code 10x more than write it. If every bit and part of the system is reinventing the wheel - the system quickly can turn into a nightmare - hard to maintain, fix, change, extend, understand... PS. It's beginner's mistake to apply patterns everywhere, on every step - it requires knowledge and experience to know that every pattern brings pros&cons and what they are, so you can decide which should be applied if at all any.

​@@mehow357 Nice essay. Lots of buzzwords without any substance. Just solve the problem and move on. If it needs refactoring, then do it. If it does not, then don't do it.

To prove they are smarter than you

@@youtubeenjoyer1743 I dread to think what your code looks like. He was a bit loquacious but there were no buzzwords ... there was substance. He basically said that you shouldn't just use patterns for the sake of using them but using them makes your code more legible because people that know the patterns/ abstractions can quickly understand your code. If you are thoughtlessly just solving problems anyway you want then it becomes very hard for people to do that and you might end up reinventing the wheel ... and reinventing a crappier version of the wheel. Not only that but the waters are tested and the pros and cons well understood.

😅

I love you

❤️❤️❤️

HAHA! I love this comment!

costco?!

5 DOLLARS A MONTH!

homie just listen to it at work

lmao im in the same spot right now. good morning to u and ur timezone mate

Pls have enough sleep! I usually listen to Prime in bathroom hour

Strange, for me it's mostly the opposite: I will to go sleep without work

@@ja1548 😂

Prime is funny, the bob guy is just an idiot

uncle bob's ideas are interesting and have some value. they're just not the way of life like they get sold to be.

@@blarghblargh When we buy Karl Marx's ideas, we end up having Lenin and Stalin, Mao and Ho Chi Minh.. Same for Immanuel Kant, whose great contributions lead to modern day atheism.

Fun hearing at least a word about Forth 😁👍

pretty normal thing to say to a podcast guest. watch the hot chicken wings guy, says it at the end of every show.

Depends on who was asking for the interview, and the arrangement that they came to. Not everyone has a sale to make dude.

Yes, which isn't a big deal unless it's used as a weapon

@@theodorealenas3171 if you're deploying weapons in the workplace, then use whatever is handy and sufficiently blunt. or, work somewhere sane.

Actually Primagen did not ask for the definition once. He actually took all sorts of concepts like Design Patterns and associated them with Clean Code. Clean Code offers a set of low-level best practices and heuristics to write understandable and maintainable code. You may disagree with it but please just read the book and dont just base your opinion on having consumed some streamers BS about it.

actually, if you read the book you will also realize that Robert Martin asks some guys to describe what clean code is and every one of them describes it in a different way, which is totally OK because it is an abstract concept, it is not a prescription. He then includes those definitions in the book. What kind of a definition were you looking for?

words of someone who never actually made any meaningful code, lol, what an assholish claim

But the planning upfront thing he describes is more of a learning experience than generating an entire diagram describing a solution. Maybe it's an artifact from the UML days, but I think it's a bit heavy handed to call it "planning upfront" when it's more like describing a napkin sketch on a post-it note or a temporary drawing on a whiteboard. This is done less frequently and still consumes a very small amount of time compared to the actual time spent writing the code. I would say his explanation of it is a much more lightweight interpretation of planning, not meant to bog down the coder. The entire waterfall approach is in reality more reminiscent of heavy upfront planning because of having less access to frequent deployments.

Worth noting also that a lot of these practices predate the widespread use of source control, and you can see that in some early papers: editing code was seen as _destructive,_ which is why this CC style places such a high price on modifications of existing code.

I think he balanced it well. Too confrontational and this would probably have been a worse conversation/interview. Really enjoyed this

Maybe because uncle bob is an old man with great experience

I think even though he does not agree with clean code, he still respect uncle bob very much.

I would say polite and maybe slightly intimidated. I think it might be intimidating to see Bob laugh so frequently and intentionally during some of the arguments. But, maybe, he's just trying to make it feel less serious and more open to discussion with that. Whereas Prime is taking it a bit more serious because he's trying to purposefully understand. The ending was extremely awkward though, I got a laugh out of it.

"The new cult is better than the old cult". Meanwhile the good ideas are tossed and we keep reinventing different flavors of the same set of solutions to the same set of problems

Months doesn't cut it. You need a year of Perl before you feel the power and it becomes fun.

He's always been like that. Everybody has quirks

Dudes a multi millionaire, talking about his passion. Hell I would also laugh all the time with these conditions

Try writing a real system in it. They tried that back in the 90s, didn't work so well.

"Lisp is like Neovim" Emacs users going nuts

​@@Imscottirlthere's been lots of big systems written in Lisp. Both then and now (more likely to be Clojure). Paul Graham got his gazillions building the airline trip planner that was eventually bought by Yahoo (?).

Legit. I've only seen the opposite extreme a few times, like dmenu.

They do code in clojure, and teach clojure.

Cognitek :P

Imagine doing banking in a dynamically typed language *shudder*

Velocity is a measurement, not a target nor a promise. So how can your "velocity be off"? The point is to tell you some kind of real rate, not the wished, hoped or estimated rate. That there are other things taking time, unpredictable things, is normal but should be managed to not overburden. Of course if you've been doing 5x more support than expected it may mean that the way you are working (development practices, testing, documentation, refactoring, monitoring, logging, planning, etc) need to change so that you don't drown in support. Something about a self-inflicted wound. I find the argument about mixing dev + test time as very odd. Untested, unfinished, undeployable features are worth nothing. There's no separate point-system for devs and testers. It's either done or not. I loathe developers that declared "I'm done", throws it to a tester and starts working on the next thing, and it doesn't even work. If you have a culture where there is a blame game of "you didn't meet your commitment" or "who estimated wrong" the organisation have not understood anything and you should either change your organization or change your organization. Tip: Remove the columns "ready for test" and "in test" from your board and only have todo, doing, done. If it's not tested it's not done and NO ONE gets any points, gold stars or pats on the back until it's actually done! The point of agile is not about processes, story points, burn-up, burn-down, sprints, etc, stuff. It's about giving everybody a healthy dose of reality so that the team and organization can adapt and change early, instead of hope that whatever "wishful plan" people have made will actually happen.

​@@ddanielsandbergwhat are your suggestions to avoid doing support? Undocumented time apart from technical support for other devs can come from operational support in my team. Documentation takes time and effort of writing and review so managers are very reluctant to give us time.

@@ghun131 I am not suggesting to "avoid doing support". I'm suggesting to figure out if/why a lot of time is spent doing support. Why would managers tell you how to do your job? As a team you need to figure out where the time is best spent, for the short term and the long term.

New company, if you can.

​@@ddanielsandberg They're comparing our estimated velocity vs actual velocity. That's what is "off". We've been told before that the separate QA column was no good, but we ignored the agile coach that told us that. We don't play the blame game, time estimation is just something we spend a lot of time doing. We spend a silly amount of time estimating when we could skip that, have a kanban type board, then line tickets up to be brought in as we have the capacity to do so based on the sprint goals. It just doesn't make sense to estimate when it's going to take the amount of time it takes. No more, no less. We might be able use the number of tickets complete at the end of two weeks as some kind of metric. BTW, we estimate by time

clean code is not wisdom lol

@@hwstar9416 agree. So much went wrong in that era, that we're just now starting to recover from

@@hwstar9416 It most certainly is, and we’re seeing the quote playing out: “Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Modern codebases are so often written from overconfident green programmers who couldn’t write maintainable code to save their lives.

It's unfortunately become fashionable to rebel against "clean code" principles and we're all having to suffer through the nightmare codebases created by over-confident inexperienced programmers who without fail believe that *their* code is "self-documenting", etc. I'm always reminded of the Martin Fowler quote: "Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand."

@@vargonian You can write code that humans understand without following the principles of Clean Code. It's not a dichotomy.

uncle bob is a clown

@@hwstar9416 uncle bob is the witch