Much admired software guru "Uncle" Bob Martin wants to take away all our fun and make us into responsible "disciplined" programmers.
I watched his...
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I agree wholeheartedly! As Donald Knuth would be pointing out, programming is an art, not a science.
Our entire history is built on the shenanigans of the MIT AI Lab, hacker culture, and a general attitude of playful experimentation. That is what we are.
(Not that I ever take Uncle Bob too seriously to begin with; this just further reinforces that stance.)
I believe that it is much harder to answer the question "what is art", then the question "what is programming" (I mean in another way than Knuth said it). But I'm not gonna argue about that
Art is easily defined. Art is anything put in a frame which says, this frame contains art. For example, an art gallery is just such a frame. I highly recommend 'The Square' for reference:-en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Square_(...
I like the definition by Scott McCloud. Art is anything you do beyond surviving e.g. if you do something which is not required for your surviving this is art.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯And in all irony, we humans have survived without computers for centuries. So, by that definition, art.
(I'm being pretty solidly tongue-in-cheek now; I know there are computers that are needed for life-critical operations, and anyway, that was deliberately false deductive reasoning on my part just now.)
Well said, actually.
I think the overall point is pretty simple: programming is entirely too wibbly-wobbly to be confined to a science. Too nebulous and resistant to solid quantification. There's science in it, like there's science in all art, but "science" doesn't quite define the whole thing.
Or maybe the problem is that we assume science is better defined than it is?
I do love a paradox.
Entertaining read ... I also think Uncle Bob's concerns are overblown and don't apply to 95% of software dev. How many of us are automating space rockets or nuclear plants, not that many.
Nobody would let uncle bob and his unhinged fanboys anywhere close to automating nuclear plants or space rockets.
Have a look at, say, MISRA-C, it is very much the opposite of all the crap uncle bob is preaching.
He's nothing but a fraud, preying on gullible untrained minds.
Thanks for making me chuckle, don't know if your statements are true but for sure they're entertaining :-)
Anyway I agree that we shouldn't take "our" Uncle too serious, reading his stuff is a waste of time that's spent better doing more productive things.
Wikipedia anyone?
"Some research results question the effectiveness of MISRA.
In a paper that compares earlier work on MISRA C:1998 with MISRA C:2004, Les Hatton comes to the conclusion that:[24]
In view of the apparent widening influence of the MISRA C standard, this paper attempts to assess whether important deficiencies in the original standard have been addressed satisfactorily. Unfortunately, they have not and the important real to false positive ratio is not much better in MISRA C 2004 than it was in MISRA C 1998 and it is unacceptably low in both."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MISRA_C
I had no idea he was so controversial, I liked watching his seminars and have to respect my elders. I am a bit shocked by the attack going on above this comment.
I wasn't aware of it either. Now reading about Type Wars blog it's quite extraordinary. We need to keep perspective and humour.
Uncle Bob stopped being relevant many years ago.