That is actually his step 1. Step 0 might be write down the problem as stated - but in his writing step 1 is really, "structure the problem." Of course you might have structured it wrong, that is in part where step 2 comes in.
My view of Uncle Bob is that his advise is attempt improve the average situation, even if taken literally as a gospell.
It’s better that everybody do route tdd, than no tests at all. It’s better to have all methods exactly 3 lines of code, than all methods being 3 pages long.
Uncle bob preaches better baseline, experience will teach all the nuance.
Disclaimer: I dont do tdd. But it’s nice method of work to know.
every time i heard a talk or read something of his I always come out with the impression that he has no idea about anything. Most of what he says sounds like bullshit to me.
His advice needs to be contextualized within the 90s and 00s. He was correcting (or overcorrecting) for issues that were prevalent then: methods that were hundreds or thousands of lines, processes with hundreds of hours of design work without writing a single line of code, no testing (or maybe handing to a QA to test, if you’re lucky), and tangled messes of logic the author thought could be saved by adding a comment.
Much of his advice seems silly or extreme now, but I believe that’s because he (and his cohort of likeminded programmers) won. Things have improved dramatically. The extreme advice worked. The problem, of course, is that you can’t just declare victory and move on. So now we have The Church of TDD and the like.
it is contextualized in around that time. That was the time I was actually learning to program. Didn't make sense then either. Doubling the line count (functions should contain a single statement) while also fragmenting it all around the place never did strike me as "better". His code was just straight up unreadable
Feels like the big shift is Rust hitting critical mass mindshare and LLM assisted translation making these rewrites viable. Rust is a very vibable language.
An announcement of Codex CLI being rewritten in C++ would be met with confusion and derision.
Once a Rust program finally compiles it's much likelier that it's correct, in comparison to other languages, at least in the sense of avoiding unexpected runtime behavior.
A great feature of pydantic are the validation hooks that let you intercept serialization/deserialization of specific fields and augment behavior.
For example if you are querying a DB that returns a column as a JSON string, trivial with Pydantic to json parse the column are part of deser with an annotation.
Pydantic is definitely slower and not a 'zero cost abstraction', but you do get a lot for it.
A better analogy would be a passport. It doesn’t stop all terrorists from boarding a plane at lest it stops already know to authorities ones (unless they have a passport on someone else’s name which is not easy).
Or perhaps, why do you lock the door to your house? A few solid kicks will open most doors, the locks can be picked, someone can smash windows and enter, and many modern homes can be entered by ripping the wall open with a crowbar and axe.
Doors and locks are purely social construct. For majority of people it's much easier to justify stealing from a porch compared to breaking in.
No more, no less.
For spammers on other hand it's just a business, there will be no reprecussions like ever and we know quite a few big and legitemate companies who started their path with marketing spam sometimes using leaked email databases.
The way you're using "justify" here, makes it seem as if you think people feel it's morally legit to steal, if it's on a porch for... reasons?! From a moral perspective, theft is theft. There's no way someone can sanely claim they thought it was a free thing, because it wasn't locked away.
Doors and locks are there to make theft harder, more overt, loud, etc, and by no means validate when it's legit to be a vile thief.
Likewise, all spam is spam. The use of tools to make it more difficult for spammers to be spammers, is the same as having doors and locks. It makes it more difficult.
edit:
What I said was, you clained they tried to justify it. So no worries, I was not implicating you.
I not trying to justify it, but if you actually look and check research about people who been caught stealing there is huge difference for them between stealing TV that dropped from a truck vs stealing from a porch vs stealing from inside the house even though it's the same TV.
Theft is theft, but for monkey brains there is huge difference between stealing someone wallet from a pocket vs picking dropped wallet and not returning it. So my point is that doors and locks work not because it's good technical measures, but due to how average Joe percieve social construct about them.
And for grey area activities online there is no such social construct because there is no percieved connection between bunch of email addresses and real people. Also in some countries it's totally legal to send you tons of physical mail spam.
I forgot the name of this fallacy, I read about it in Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile a long time ago, but basically being wrong at spam won’t cause a lot of damage while being wrong once about a terrorist may cause thousands of deaths
It does feel like we are hurtling towards a world where every industry will have a high volume producer of generated content, which will force the creation of a high volume summarizer of generated content.
"Having trouble processing a medical claim with 50+ pages of notes? Not to worry, Dragon Copilot Claim Review(tm) trims the fluff and tells you what really happened!"
"Having trouble understanding a large convoluted PR? Not to worry, Copilot(tm) Automated Review has your back!"
"Having trouble decided which cordless vacuum to buy? Not to worry, Amazon's Customers Say(tm) shows you what people think!"
There is definitely _some_ world utility to this arms race, but is it enough?
It's dumb and I hate it. It's exactly the same with job applications: AI generated resumes and AI generated cover letters read by AIs, we might as well save the compute time and send bullet points, but no we all have to continue the dance even though the music stopped. So many bright minds working on such degenerate technology... the flip side is that I spend less and less time online as LLMs greatly accelerated the slow rot that had taken hold of the web
The way you described it, that's not a problem at all, but a clear improvement. Thing is, every industry already has "a high volume producer of generated content" that, except for the last case, arose organically, due to reasons other than trying to confuse the reader. The creation of "a high volume summarizer" doesn't automatically mean an arms race.
Medical claims won't be growing in pages just because a doctor can parse them a bit faster. They may grow initially, because it's likely that people's mental capacity is what keeps other factors from ballooning the claims further - but it'll level out when some other practical limit is reached. Same with coding and PRs, same with research and all kinds of activities - except advertising.
There, AI will (already is) causing an arms race, because the "high volume producer"'s goal is to overwhelm their victims, so if the victims start protecting themselves with AI tools, the producer will keep increasing production to compensate. But that's not the fault of AI - it's the fault of allowing the advertising industry to exist.
Or more specifically, everything that is Turing complete can run DOOM, but most languages are only Turing complete under certain assumptions which are not met in practice
No one uses Ruby because it is fast. They use it because it is an ergonomic language with a battle-tested package for every webserver based activity you can code up.
Crystal is an ergonomic language, too, looking a lot like Ruby even beyond a cursory glance. What Ruby has, like any longstanding language, is a large number of packages to help development along, so languages like Crystal have to do a lot of catching up. Looking at the large number of abandoned gems though, I'm not sure it's that big a difference, the most important ones could be targeted.
I'm not sure that has any relevance when compared with Python or JS or Go though, they seem to have thriving ecosystems too - is Rails really that much better than the alternatives? I wouldn't know but I highly doubt it.
> is Rails really that much better than the alternatives?
I really think so. I've _looked_. I've tried all sorts of other web frameworks. And, admittedly, I am most familiar with Rails, so I'm maybe a bit biased. But it's hard to find anything that comes particularly close to the productivity of using Rails. The tooling's great, the ecosystem is great, it's organized well, the documentation is good. It's just... really a pleasant experience to use.
Elixir's Phoenix comes pretty close, as does PHP's Laravel, imo. Special shout out for Rust's Loco, too, which is relatively new, but looking potentially promising.
I recommend giving Rails an open-minded tire kicking. I think you'll be surprised by how quickly you can get going.
I've used Rails (I've possibly committed to it, though I've forgotten if I have), my point is that I don't know those other languages' frameworks well enough to judge the difference, but I don't see any complaints.
You even seem to admit as much while being most familiar with Rails. Do you know anyone who'd love to switch over? Or would you choose it ahead of a competitor if you were green? There'd have to be a large competitive advantage.
I’d jump ship if there was a mature, stable competitor in the Typescript ecosystem.
Unfortunately I think language differences mean it’s going to be a long time before anyone catches up. Ruby just makes for some really interesting wizardry that as far as I can tell isn’t possible (or perhaps not as ergonomic?) in Typescript.
Furthermore there seems to be a cultural difference. I haven’t met many JS devs who came to the Ruby side and were like, “Aw shit this is better.” (I’m one such dev, but I hated Ruby and Rails for a really long time before I changed my opinion and embraced it.)
But at this point in my career I value stable boring technology way more than my personal taste du-jour so I code in Ruby and really love Rails.
I am still hoping once Crystal stabilise on Windows ( Currently it still feels very much beta ). They could work on making compiling speed faster and incremental compiling.
1. Think about the problem and write it all down
2. Research what other people have done to solve this problem
3. Think about it some more and write all that down too
4. Sleep on it
I think the conclusion is the same: Good design does not naturally arise from good programming, and background/domain knowledge is essential
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