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

26 Nov 2024

On Tue, Nov 26, 2024 at 8:48 AM Kevin Bowling &lt;kevin.bowling(a)kev009.com&gt; wrote:
...
  On Thu, Nov 21, 2024 at 6:53 PM Dan Cross
&lt;crossd(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
  [TUHS to Bcc:, Cc: COFF]

 On Mon, Nov 18, 2024 at 11:47 AM Anton Shepelev &lt;anton.txt(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
  Dan Cross &lt;crossd(a)gmail.com&gt; 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? 
 And what about Hollub? 
Pretty much the same thing.

...
  A long time ago I came across and seemed to think some
of his earlier books (on C) were ok. 
Yeah.  He wrote a book about compilers, but as near as I can tell,
it's mostly material regurgitated from the Dragon Book, just a
different presentation, and a less academic focus.

Curiously, he's in the acknowledgements for K&R (I forget which
edition). I guess he read an early draft?

...
  Looking lately, I don’t tend to care for the
metaphysical and ceremonial stuff whence one starts talking about design patterns and
scrum instead of doing the work so I haven’t paid attention.

 It’s a strong accusation to levy publicly and maybe should be explained. 
Many of Hollub's claims are ridiculous on the face of them ("you don't
need a bug tracker!  You don't need schedules!  Code should be written
by 'mobbing'!"

Here's a representative example:
https://twitter.com/allenholub/status/1734661813638459843  In that
tweet he writes, "What we do involves essentially no mathematical
analysis of anything. We are not doing math.If you're building a
system that requires math, then the math is part of the _domain_, not
the development process."  I suppose he's never heard of time or space
complexity analysis of algorithms?

Or how about this one:
https://twitter.com/allenholub/status/1827790079617892675 "A PR [Pull
Request] is necessary only when someone you don't trust writes code in
isolation. It's essential for OS work, for example, or if you're
working using scatter/gather [https://bit.ly/3XYLhb3] It's also a
complete waste of time if you're working in a mob#/ensemble (or even a
pair) because the code is reviewed as it's written." I suppose he's
never worked someplace with a real, rigorous review culture. Also,
https://x.com/allenholub/status/1634050850434826240

A few others:
https://x.com/allenholub/status/1594859115557232640
https://x.com/allenholub/status/1613609655519019008
https://x.com/allenholub/status/1656811047783899138
https://x.com/allenholub/status/1610708432331632641

He has some code on Github that's relatively recent. It's not very good.

        - Dan C.

...
 > 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/1eba53c08fb530effb9d29aca…
> (not the current commit; he modified it somewhat after I sent him
>
https://github.com/unclebob/PDP8EmulatorIpad/commit/dbfa03e90a084a25992dff7…,
> which he did not acknowledge; see
>
https://github.com/unclebob/PDP8EmulatorIpad/pull/2/commits/84483cd4d60320c…
> 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-…)
> 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/qN8txMeOCA…)
>
> 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. 

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