[TUHS] Re: Minimum Array Sizes in 16 bit C (was Maximum)

[Luther Johnson <luther.johnson@makerlisp.com>]

"Appeal to Authority", or "Argument from Authority", one of the
fallacious argument methods. I think there are many "experts" who learn
just enough about a topic to write a book about it, the idea seems to
be, to become an "authority" on a topic, to sell more books and gain
more authority and notoriety. I've read many good books by brilliant
authors who not only could write about certain topics, but were actually
some of the inventors and developers, who then explained it all to us so
we could make more things practically work. And then there are
slapped-together books of technically trendy slogans and simplistic
contrived examples. I like to read books in the former category, the
latter, not so much. We can tell the difference by whether the books
give us anything we can use - and this is usually more in the realm of
ideas, rather than code snippets or "design patterns". The way I like to
think about things, anyway.

On 11/21/2024 06:53 PM, Dan Cross wrote:
> [TUHS to Bcc:, Cc: COFF]
>
> On Mon, Nov 18, 2024 at 11:47 AM Anton Shepelev <anton.txt@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Programmer ability is certainly an issue, but I would suggest that
>>> another goes back to what Rob was alluding to: compiler writers have
>>> taken too much advantage of UB, making it difficult to write
>>> well-formed programs that last.
>> Following the letter, rather than the spirit, of the standard?
> Pretty much!
>
>> [snip]
>>> My sense is that tossing in bad programmers is just throwing gasoline
>>> onto a dumpster fire. Particularly when they look to charlatans like
>>> Robert Martin or Allen Holub as sources of education and inspiration
>>> instead of seeking out proper sources of education.
>> I am a bad one as well, to have liked some things in Martin's books
>> /Clean Code/ and /Clean Architecture/ .  True, heis no Wirth, nor
>> Dijxtra, nor Knuth, but why a charlatan?
> Briefly, because he writes with unwarranted confidence, and just isn't
> a very good programmer himself.
>
> He writes with an authoritative voice about things that he doesn't
> know very much, if anything, about. For example, the things he's
> written about static typing in programming languages are complete
> nonsense. Sriram Krishnamurthi called him out on that
> (https://x.com/ShriramKMurthi/status/1136411753590472707) and he did
> not respond well, doubling down on his unfounded opinions
> (https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2019/06/08/TestsAndTypes.html).
> Later, he justified his opinion by making allusions to the amount of
> time he's been programming
> (https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2021/06/25/OnTypes.html). Hey,
> when it comes to logical fallacies centered on appeals to length of
> experience, well...I swooshed a basketball for the first time more
> than 40 years ago, but I've given up any dream I may have ever had of
> being a point guard in the NBA. Just doing something for a long time
> doesn't mean you're good at it.
>
> Robert Martin doesn't write production-quality code, period. He claims
> to "ship" lots of code, but acknowledges that most of that is example
> code for his books and personal side-projects. But the code examples
> he has publicly available are not particularly well-structured,
> readable, or maintainable. For a particular egregious example, see
> https://github.com/unclebob/PDP8EmulatorIpad/blob/1eba53c08fb530effb9d29aca8134f7acadfdd5f/src/topt.c
> (not the current commit; he modified it somewhat after I sent him
> https://github.com/unclebob/PDP8EmulatorIpad/commit/dbfa03e90a084a25992dff79e5064897bce5ef42,
> which he did not acknowledge; see
> https://github.com/unclebob/PDP8EmulatorIpad/pull/2/commits/84483cd4d60320cd6ca5637f2c062d9d0540cc4a
> for the timeline).
>
> And while that small program is a particularly bad example, other bits
> of his code are also bad. Ousterhout was asked to comment on his
> "extract till you drop" approach and presented with a "refactoring"
> Martin did of a program due to Knuth
> (https://sites.google.com/site/unclebobconsultingllc/one-thing-extract-till-you-drop).
> Ousterhout responded that he was "bewildered and horrified" by the
> approach. As Ousterhout put it, "He has taken 25 lines of code that
> are pretty straightforward and easy to understand, and turned them
> into 38 lines with 9 methods, none of which has a stitch of
> documentation. What was the point of this?"
> (https://groups.google.com/g/software-design-book/c/Kb5K3YcjIXw/m/qN8txMeOCAAJ)
>
> These are all typical of Martin's approach. Hence why I say the man is
> a charlatan. Others have written at length about why, and how, his
> advice is generally bad.
>
>          - Dan C.
>