Development Central

Atwood and Spolsky are digging their hole deeper:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001225.html

Be sure to read Uncle Bob’s posts on the matter:

http://blog.objectmentor.com/articles/2009/01/31/quality-doesnt-matter-that-much-jeff-and-joel

http://blog.objectmentor.com/articles/2009/02/06/on-open-letter-to-joel-spolsky-and-jeff-atwood

I’m heavily on Bob Martin’s side in this. I’ve read Clean Code, and Martin’s clearly earned his chops.

While I agree that one can use Agile techniques to achieve good OO design, it’s extremely helpful to know what good design looks like.

I’ve worked with unprincipled pragmatists. The git-r-done philosophy leads to unmaintainable code. I’m a huge fan of Agile/XP, but XP takes discipline. If you don’t care about software craftsmanship, you’re in the wrong profession.

I’m tired of bloggers throwing out controversial topics to increase readership. I read some bozo the other day who had a post on 10 reasons why .NET sucks. (The ICloneable interface is the only one that’s meaningful, and he misspelled that.)

Hey! Morons! Why don’t you take a lesson from Uncle Bob and try to impart actual information to your readers?

And since I’m just ranting and haven’t really taught you anything, I’ll shut up now.

P.S. Would you buy a house designed by an architect who didn’t follow any principles, but had a vague methodology that guided him most of the time? Beck wouldn’t put up with that; don’t call it Agile.

Update - February 13, 2009

Uncle Bob posted the definitive statement on the meaning of “principle".

Update - February 14, 2009

Here’s Palermo weighing in on this.

Update - February 17, 2009

Pragmatism over Principles II