I think his views on how to achieve good quality software are nearly antithetical to the goals of Rust. As expressed in that blog post and in Clean Code, he thinks better discipline, particularly through writing lots and lots of explicit unit tests, is the only path to reliable software. Rust, on the other hand, is very much designed to make the compiler and other tooling bear as much of the burden of correctness as possible.
(To be clear, I realize you’re kidding. But I do think it’s important to know just how at odds the TDD philosophy is from the “safe languages” philosophy.)
This is an absolute terrible post :/ I cannot believe he thinks that is a good argument at all. It basically boils down to:
Here is a new feature modern languages are starting to adopt.
You might thing that is a good thing. Lists various reasonable reasons it might be a good thing.
The question is: Whose job is it to manage that risk? Is it the language’s job? Or is it the programmer’s job?
And then moves on to the next thing in the same pattern. He lists loads of reasonable reasons you might want the feature gives no reasons you would not want it and but says everything in a way to lead you into thinking you are wrong to think you want these new features while his only true arguments are why you do want them…
Yeesh, I thought you were being hyperbolic, but it really is that bad! He even has this massive self report towards the end:
And how do you avoid being punished? There are two ways. One that works; and one that doesn’t. The one that doesn’t work is to design everything up front before coding. The one that does avoid the punishment is to override all the safeties.
And so you will declare all your classes and all your functions open. You will never use exceptions. And you will get used to using lots and lots of ! characters to override the null checks and allow NPEs to rampage through your systems.
Uncle Bob must be the kind of guy who makes all of his types any when writing Typescript.
But is he rewriting in Rust?
Unlikely, unless his view has changed substantially in the last seven years: https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2017/01/11/TheDarkPath.html
I think his views on how to achieve good quality software are nearly antithetical to the goals of Rust. As expressed in that blog post and in Clean Code, he thinks better discipline, particularly through writing lots and lots of explicit unit tests, is the only path to reliable software. Rust, on the other hand, is very much designed to make the compiler and other tooling bear as much of the burden of correctness as possible.
(To be clear, I realize you’re kidding. But I do think it’s important to know just how at odds the TDD philosophy is from the “safe languages” philosophy.)
This is an absolute terrible post :/ I cannot believe he thinks that is a good argument at all. It basically boils down to:
And then moves on to the next thing in the same pattern. He lists loads of reasonable reasons you might want the feature gives no reasons you would not want it and but says everything in a way to lead you into thinking you are wrong to think you want these new features while his only true arguments are why you do want them…
It makes no sense.
Yeesh, I thought you were being hyperbolic, but it really is that bad! He even has this massive self report towards the end:
Uncle Bob must be the kind of guy who makes all of his types
anywhen writing Typescript.Ahhhh, the ol’ “dynamic languages are better than static languages because I have tests that check for different types” argument.