6th Module: Uncle Bob's Cabin


I think this has been one of the most dense and varied source content for one of the blog entries for this course. I guessed at first that the podcast would concentrate on topics mainly revolving around techniques and tools that make a programmer a craftsman and how one can benefit from said practices. Bob Martin seems like a very passionate person who understands, or at least tries to, what are the causes and situations that result in the current state on the industry. He also loves to code and believes that everything that we produce must be a reflection of said code. In general, I have been convinced by him and I really liked all his anecdotes and general knowledge of computer and programming history. He really does come off as an eccentric uncle.

His point about architects and how young people tend to aspire or have management roles as a goal, rather than just aspiring to be really good programmers is kind of a mixed bag, at least for me. Normally, when one person is in charge of managing something, they get so completely lost in it that they can no longer contribute the way they used to. Of course, this does not have to be the norm, but it can be common if it is a big project. One example that I can personally think of is with the school project of Semestre I. I was assigned as “manager” and had to oversee the general production process. While I was dying to write some code and leave my mark on the software we were producing, most of the time I was solving (or trying to solve) logistics, human and scheduling issues. Maybe I was just inexperienced, but I think that you can only be a great programmer or craftsman if you are able within your workplace to commit yourself to the goal of 100% coding.

The final conversation Bob and Markus have about the future of programming languages is very interesting to me. Something that caught my attention is to how it dismisses most functional programming languages for the industry or as particularly useful, while at the same time prophesizing the advent of a language that will have features from those languages in a way more people can use them.  I think many programmers that play around with functional programming would wish that it was used a lot more in the industry. At least that is my case.

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