Martin Fowler is an enterprise buzzword methodologist. He was into UML, refactoring and patterns and Java back in the days. Nowadays he is into agile, TDD and ruby.
He has a big respect in certain circles, and even I have the Refactoring book, which was a disappointment for me, because it was about practices that was trivial for me after two years of proferssional work, while going into the details too much.
The plural of anecdote is not data, but when I worked at ThoughtWorks, Martin sent me some code to look at. It was very clean OO code (very smalltalk-ey in design and form, thought it was written in Ruby). The man can code well (not to the level of say Peter Norvig, but then not many of us can) and competently and is very sharp and when he gets hands on, solves problems fast.It is true that he doesn't have any code online where we can look at it.
Another admirable trait I've witnessed is his willingness to say "I don't know" when asked questions outside his circle of competence. He often says it very bluntly (which has caused some heartburn to some ThoughtWorkers once in a while, but that is another story).
His "Enterprise Patterns" book is very useful for anyone working on enterprise software. I believe DHH was influenced by the book when he was hacking Rails.
His upcoming book on rich gui apps seems promising too. Also he doesn't make outragoeus claims or adopt a condescending atitude to programmers who don't work the way he does/advocates (unlike say Robert Martin). I wouldn't dismiss him as a "know nothing" talker/blowhard.
As I said, just anecdotes. Make of them what you will.
His enterprise applications patterns book is superb. An excellent reference to have to hand when you're planning a system. And because it's all written down, you can point to it for substance underneath your decisions when you get skepticism from straight line programmers who just want to start coding without getting excited abuout structure.
Oops, my mistake. But the above still holds for Martin Fowler btw. And all those enterprise methodologists look the same to me: they advocate something, but you never see the code they produce, as it is some proprietary crud system at the end of the day :)
Intelligent people often dismiss Robert Martin's writings because he has very extreme/condescending opinions about programmming without having the hacker cred to match them. (See 10ren's post above for an example of his condescending attitude and an extreme opinion).
Someone like Linus Torvalds can pull this off, Bob Martin, not so much. Linus nearly always has good reasons for his stated beliefs and agree or disagree you can see why he says what he says. Also he is an acknowledged uber hacker. Bob Martin does write code(Fitnesse) unlike most other agile "guru"/consultant types, but it isn't really anything extraordinary (which is all right, as long as he doesn't presume to then teach other people how to program "correctly").
It is interesting that a great hacker like Peter Norvig is modest and unassuming and chooses his words carefully, as does Knuth for example, while people like Ron Jeffries and "Uncle" Bob say outrageous things with nothing to back them up but faith in their ideology .. err.. methodology .
Well, except that the bowling scores thing had a clear spec from the beginning, and was an easier fit for a blog post. The Sudoku thing seemed more like thrashing around in the how-to-represent-data space to avoid thinking about the algorithm.
Comments
Enlighten us folks who aren't methodology scenesters. What is wrong this Uncle Bob guy?
Martin Fowler is an enterprise buzzword methodologist. He was into UML, refactoring and patterns and Java back in the days. Nowadays he is into agile, TDD and ruby.
He has a big respect in certain circles, and even I have the Refactoring book, which was a disappointment for me, because it was about practices that was trivial for me after two years of proferssional work, while going into the details too much.
The plural of anecdote is not data, but when I worked at ThoughtWorks, Martin sent me some code to look at. It was very clean OO code (very smalltalk-ey in design and form, thought it was written in Ruby). The man can code well (not to the level of say Peter Norvig, but then not many of us can) and competently and is very sharp and when he gets hands on, solves problems fast.It is true that he doesn't have any code online where we can look at it.
Another admirable trait I've witnessed is his willingness to say "I don't know" when asked questions outside his circle of competence. He often says it very bluntly (which has caused some heartburn to some ThoughtWorkers once in a while, but that is another story).
His "Enterprise Patterns" book is very useful for anyone working on enterprise software. I believe DHH was influenced by the book when he was hacking Rails.
His upcoming book on rich gui apps seems promising too. Also he doesn't make outragoeus claims or adopt a condescending atitude to programmers who don't work the way he does/advocates (unlike say Robert Martin). I wouldn't dismiss him as a "know nothing" talker/blowhard.
As I said, just anecdotes. Make of them what you will.
Enterprise Patterns is a classic, that alone redeems the man's non-hackish career.
P.S. I also enjoyed Enterprise Integration Patterns by Hohpe and Woolf.
His enterprise applications patterns book is superb. An excellent reference to have to hand when you're planning a system. And because it's all written down, you can point to it for substance underneath your decisions when you get skepticism from straight line programmers who just want to start coding without getting excited abuout structure.
Martin Fowler != Robert C Martin (Uncle Bob)
Oops, my mistake. But the above still holds for Martin Fowler btw. And all those enterprise methodologists look the same to me: they advocate something, but you never see the code they produce, as it is some proprietary crud system at the end of the day :)
I don't know him from Adam, but his "TDD-based" bowling attempt in Clojure seems like a microcosm of that other guy's Sudoku solver in Ruby.
I asked because I have seen a few other people whose opinions I respect dismiss his writings. So I had to ask.
Cheers!
Intelligent people often dismiss Robert Martin's writings because he has very extreme/condescending opinions about programmming without having the hacker cred to match them. (See 10ren's post above for an example of his condescending attitude and an extreme opinion).
Someone like Linus Torvalds can pull this off, Bob Martin, not so much. Linus nearly always has good reasons for his stated beliefs and agree or disagree you can see why he says what he says. Also he is an acknowledged uber hacker. Bob Martin does write code(Fitnesse) unlike most other agile "guru"/consultant types, but it isn't really anything extraordinary (which is all right, as long as he doesn't presume to then teach other people how to program "correctly").
It is interesting that a great hacker like Peter Norvig is modest and unassuming and chooses his words carefully, as does Knuth for example, while people like Ron Jeffries and "Uncle" Bob say outrageous things with nothing to back them up but faith in their ideology .. err.. methodology .
Well, except that the bowling scores thing had a clear spec from the beginning, and was an easier fit for a blog post. The Sudoku thing seemed more like thrashing around in the how-to-represent-data space to avoid thinking about the algorithm.