Object Mentor Blog: An Open Letter to Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood

An Open Letter to Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood

Uncle Bob — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 20:53:00 -0600

Joel, Jeff,

Here is an open letter to the two of you that I hope we can use in our upcoming StackOverflow #40 podcast. I won’t post it on my blog until we’ve been able to iterate it a bit. I’ve spent several hours on this trying to balance the tone. It used to be a lot longer <grin>.

Dear Joel and Jeff

In the Stack Overflow Podcast #38 you said: “Last week I was listening to a podcast on Hanselminutes, with Robert Martin talking about the SOLID principles … they all sounded to me like extremely bureaucratic programming that came from the mind of somebody that has not written a lot of code, frankly.”

And again later: ”...it seems to me like a lot of the Object Oriented Design principles you’re hearing lately from people like Robert Martin and Kent Beck and so forth have gone off the deep end into architecture for architecture’s sake.”

And yet again: “People that say things like this have just never written a heck of a lot of code.”

And still again: “One of the SOLID principles, (a butchering of the Single Responsibility Principle) and it’s just… idiotic! You can’t build software that way!”

I hope you’ve had time to perform a little due diligence since then, and that you now realize that your statements were unfair, harmful, and were pretty much crap.

I understand that you were trying to make a valid point and that the words just got away from you a bit. I quite agree that a dogmatic or religious application of the SOLID principles is neither realistic nor beneficial. If you had read through any of the articles and/or books I’ve written on these principles over the last 15 years, you’d have found that I don’t recommend the religious or dogmatic approach you blamed me for. In short, you jumped to a erroneous conclusion about me, and about the principles, because you weren’t familiar with the material.

I understand that this was a podcast, and that you were both just jawing. However, your podcasts are a product that you ship to everyone in the world. The content of that product can do great good; but it can also do great and permanent harm. One would think that you’d want to be careful with such a product. Yet in the intensity of the moment you got a bit careless and spewed some crap instead. That’s fine, everybody makes mistakes. But then you shipped it! You shipped a product that had a huge bug in it. You should have had tests!

Could it be that when you said ”...quality just doesn’t matter that much…” you were being serious. Clearly the quality of podcast #38 didn’t matter much to you, since you shipped it without verifying that your information was accurate. As a result, you did unjust harm to me. Were I a more litigious person, we might be having this discussion in court.

Now I’m quite certain that you don’t want to ship bad product. I just think that you’ve been careless with your production process. You haven’t put in place a mechanism that will stop you from shipping crap. So I suggest that you practice Test Driven Development with your podcast. Write down the acceptance criteria beforehand (I suggest lawsuit avoidance would be a high priority), and then review the product against those criteria afterwards. Yes, this will take some time, and there will be a cost. However, it will pay back handsomely because your product will be far better, and you will avoid embarrassments like this one (or worse). And, after all, products deserve and require this kind of care. So do your listeners. This is just simple professionalism. Don’t ship shit. —-——-

Some of the other points we could talk about in the podcast:

TDD for real this time. You guys can just throw your complaints at me and I’ll address them. * For example, I’d like to explain how one would test Joel’s JPeg compression feature.
ISP and SRP, the two principles that Joel butchered.
Mike Connie’s observation (in #39) about interfaces.
How, when, and why to apply Principles and Patterns.
From Stack Overflow: * Large Switch statements: Bad OOP? * JSON is used only for JavaScript? (Rant on XML) * ASP.Net – How to effectively use design patterns without over-engineering!

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