Re:The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow
by acdha on Wednesday February 08, 2017 @11:20AM
(#13599434)
> Do you truly believe that specific DP book caused that effect?
>
> I don't. The DP book is extremely dry reading and most programmers have not actually read it.
This doesn't match my experience but I think that's because you're conflating two related ideas: while few people may have deeply read DP, that's not a requirement for it to have had a strong influence on them, any more than it is necessary for someone to have deeply read and understood their holy book to have strong religious beliefs.
I make that comparison because the worst projects I've seen were heavily based on DP but in a bad way because it was used more as a club than a means for self-improvement. Architects threw it around to bolster their status, a strong push towards ritual cargo culting rather than making sure the problem was well understood enough to know that the code being written matched the actual business case, and any criticism was met with a flak shield of “This is the best practice way according to DP”.
That's not necessarily DPs fault — although there is a discussion to be had about valuing comprehensibility if you want to make meaningful improvements — but it was definitely an effect shaping software development for the worse for over a decade.
This doesn't match my experience but I think that's because you're conflating two related ideas: while few people may have deeply read DP, that's not a requirement for it to have had a strong influence on them, any more than it is necessary for someone to have deeply read and understood their holy book to have strong religious beliefs.
I make that comparison because the worst projects I've seen were heavily based on DP but in a bad way because it was used more as a club than a means for self-improvement. Architects threw it around to bolster their status, a strong push towards ritual cargo culting rather than making sure the problem was well understood enough to know that the code being written matched the actual business case, and any criticism was met with a flak shield of “This is the best practice way according to DP”.
That's not necessarily DPs fault — although there is a discussion to be had about valuing comprehensibility if you want to make meaningful improvements — but it was definitely an effect shaping software development for the worse for over a decade.