Martin and I have our differences, but this article isn’t really useful. Martin has a brand and a style. A lot of people find it engaging and entertaining. If you don’t, that’s fine, there’s plenty of other ways to learn about the ideas that are more concise.

"I did it like that because it's cleaner" is a non sense. A program must be maintenable, efficient, observable, testable, scalable, performant, readable, secured. Each criteria can be objectively measured in a kind of radar diagram and can be maximized as long as it does not sacrifice another criteria. Form follows function.

Even "simple" (from KISS) is too vague, fortunately in the conference "simple made easy" Rich Hickey defines what is simple: not interleaved. simple comes from sin plex, the opposite of con plex. Not always easy to make something simple.

However I don't see anything wrong with SOLID. Separation of concerns is how a modern society or a football team works, and S brings D because specialization involves good relationships ("no man is an island" wrote John Donne ), and D is strongly related to L. I has no drawbacks.

However I don't separate data from business logic anymore (no data access layer). Business logic applies on data, not on objects that hide data. Translating a ER diagram into anemic classes while the DBA do the same in the DB does not have any value and forces to use obstruction pattern like repository. If entity classes have properties and methods (a Plane class that has a 'takeOff' and 'land' methods for instance) it is different but must most backend I see don't implement entity classes that way. Because their classes represent data, not animated concept. Player class with a shoot method might makes sense for a video game, User class with a addComment method for a CRUD app makes less sense to me.

It you look at most of SOLID it is about building little pieces that eventually will fit together and rules to avoid incompatibilities when the world you built comes together.

I personally don't like when people stick to SOLID like it's the holy hammer, but nearly every serious programming language has a convention on how to write SOLID code, and it will be followed, which makes my job easier if I'm new to the codebase.

Saying SOLID makes bad code is as over-simplistic as saying SOLID makes good code.

I always thought I was the one that sucked but now I'm absolutely certain that whole zeitgeist was total crap.

In the end many of them are still quite subjective. It is useful to try to avoid mixing unrelated stuff into the same class. But trying to religiously find the boundary to what a single responsibility means in each specific case is a waste of time.

https://github.com/johnousterhout/aposd-vs-clean-code

But extending the complaint to all acronyms isn't helpful. ACID, OLAP, EBITDA, etc are perfectly good names with clear meanings that can be easily discovered.

> You have the vendor pushed acronyms like: ACID, CAP, OLAP, OLTP.

ACID and the CAP theorem in particular has _very_ serious consequences if you're doing anything that isn't a toy with a database, and if there was one thing worth beating into developers, it would be the consequences of those. With the big push on columnar stores and various flexible database options (and replication and etc.) understanding that OLAP and OLTP workloads have very different needs and performance profiles is also something that many (most?) developers seem to miss, and again seems like something that needs to be beaten into a huge cohort of developers. Just because there are some silly/stupid cargo cult acronym around process, does not mean that anything that's an acronym or is confusing to your _garden variety history major_ can just be dismissed. This is part of why we get a lot of the monstrosities that exist out in the world today; there's this really perverse behavior I've seen among people coming from somewhere other than the hard sciences to wave away formalism and anything that smells remotely like math as "oh they're just being dogmatic".

Decomposition is good. Too much decomposition recreates complexity in the interactions.

Immutability is good. Immutability everywhere creates gymnastics with more mental load.

Extensibility is good. Extensible-everything is reduces usability.

Program isolation is good. Too much isolation melts your laptop into a Docker-shaped puddle.

Having the restraint to not apply your pet idea to everything under the sun is the mark of a mature programmer and indeed a mature person.

> To me people calling their code or software “Clean”, “Easy”, or “Simple” has always felt wrong. You aren’t entitled to declare your own creation to have some subjective trait you strived for when writing it.

Follows:

> The more objective you assume you are, the more easily manipulated you can be by subjectivity, be it your own subjectivity or others.

I'm happy to go on record stating the former is more forgivable than a lazy false truism or platitude.

I mean... how do you even make the comparison between "A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship" and "History of Hispanic Colonialism”!?

It doesn't have to be. You can have standards without clinging onto them for dear life like you're about to be swept away in a flood.

> This is not a specific critique of the contents or ideas in SOLID or Clean Code. It’s about how it presents itself and how that made me feel.

Yeah, this blog post added to the dogma. Someone will read this and just look for something else to cling on to. For critique to work, you can't be injecting even more of your superficial opinion, and the readers have to care instead of impatiently looking for "the answer".

I was given Clean Code as a junior developer... didn't think it was mind blowing, but I used the parts that made sense and left the parts that didn't... what you're supposed to do anytime you're exposed to other peoples opinions. And I never felt a need to follow it blindly. If your code got inappropriately criticized by your leads or managers for not being Clean or SOLID enough, or they forced you into following Clean Code like it was the bible, then be mad at those guys!