It's a fact about the industry that most such consultants-authors-speakers don't actually build systems themselves and haven't for a long time. If you want to get prominent at it, telling other people how to build things is itself a full-time job. The contradiction here is unfortunately very real.

I agree in principle, but not when applied to Martin Fowler. I doubt the guy who literally wrote the book on refactoring did so without any real-world experience.

http://refactoring.com/catalog/index.html

Sure, there was a time he spent a lot of time building OO systems. I don't know how much time he's actually spent building ~distributed~ systems.

I like the book Refactoring too.

But I don't think the book, in itself, can cited as evidence that he's built large, real-world systems.

There's a big step between "no experience" and "major experience with large scale, distributed systems".

When I had six months of programming experience, I could do a fine rendition of the standard OO doctrines. With far more experience now, I can mostly describe how they fail to operate in the real world.

I know who Martin Fowler is. I love his "Refactoring" book.

On the other hand, once you get famous, you can go around and get big $ telling people what they want to hear and you can lose your edge.

If this is representative of his work these days, he should preface it with something like "I'm not a doctor but I play one on TV"

> If this is representative of his work these days, he should preface it with something like "I'm not a doctor but I play one on TV"

Really? That bad? Care to explain?