I haven't seen a lot of evidence that Martin really has the coding chops to speak as authoritatively as he does. I think when you become famous for giving advice or being an "expert", it can be difficult to humble yourself enough to learn new things. I know personally I've said a lot of dumb things about coding in the past; luckily none of those things were codified into a "classic" book.
What strikes me about the advice in Clean Code is that the ideas are, at best, generally unproven (IE just Martin's opinion), and at worst, justify bad habits. Saying "I don't need to comment my code, my code speaks for itself" is alluring, but rarely true (and the best function names can't tell you WHY a function/module is the way it is.) Chopping up functions and moving things around looks and feels like work, except nothing gets done, and frankly often strikes me as being the coding equivalent of fidget spinners (although at least fidget spinners dont screw up your history). Whenever Martin is challenged on these things he just says to use "good judgement", but the code and advice is supposed to demonstrate good judgement and mostly it does not.
Personally I wish people would just forget about Clean Code. You're better off avoiding it or treating it as an example of things not to do.
I watched some talks he gave 15 years ago and what struck me was that he would use analogies to things like physics that were just objectively incorrect. He was confidently talking about a subject he clearly didn't understand at even an undergraduate level.
Then for the rest of the talk he would speak just as confidently about coding. Why would I believe anything he has to say when his confidence is clearly not correlated to how well he understand the material?
What strikes me about the advice in Clean Code is that the ideas are, at best, generally unproven (IE just Martin's opinion), and at worst, justify bad habits. Saying "I don't need to comment my code, my code speaks for itself" is alluring, but rarely true (and the best function names can't tell you WHY a function/module is the way it is.) Chopping up functions and moving things around looks and feels like work, except nothing gets done, and frankly often strikes me as being the coding equivalent of fidget spinners (although at least fidget spinners dont screw up your history). Whenever Martin is challenged on these things he just says to use "good judgement", but the code and advice is supposed to demonstrate good judgement and mostly it does not.
Personally I wish people would just forget about Clean Code. You're better off avoiding it or treating it as an example of things not to do.