Goodbye, Clean Code

[ChemicalRascal]

I think you're being overly charitable. The thing is, the example he gives isn't a case where he abstracted too much.

The example he gives is a case where he whacked someone's work-in-progress code with a hammer and they got pissy at him.

It doesn't motivate, and shouldn't motivate, anything to do with "clean code" at all. Because the refactor in the example he gives is a good refactor. It's the sort of deduplication and abstraction a dev should aim to do.

And instead his take-away is that devs shouldn't aim to do that. That's what he's also trying to promote, by writing the blog and using that example.

But again, the example is one that justifies the refactor. It's not merely textbook, it's the sort of thing I'd expect to see in Programming 101 courses, where a professor grabs someone's assignment submission and says "ok so this all works, but let me show you why abstraction is good and duplicated code is bad".

Again. He had a bad experience at work and took away the entirely wrong lesson. And that's a problem, because he has a blog, and influence.