Dot Net Tricks

I know nobody reads my blog anyway, but I still feel the need to comment (rant) to the blogosphere. 

The back story goes like this.  Joel Spoelsky said some pretty irresponsible things in an interview, calling SOLID principles bureaucratic and saying "(code) quality doesn't matter."  Jeff Atwood more or less agreed with him and posted the Ferengi Programmer.  There has been a lot of outrage and debate and even Jeffrey Palermo has commented on his blog as well as various codebetter people.

Here's some context I borrowed from  Jeffrey's site.
Original published audio program.  First response by Robert Martin.  Attempt at clarification by Jeff Atwood.  Further backing of SOLID principles by Robert Martin.

So there's all this discussion flowing about, about whether or not SOLID principles are useful to programmers or not and finally we have Jeff Atwood's latest response:
Read Ulimate Programming Power

I feel the need to respond, because in the second paragraph of this post, he quotes my comment:

The majority of developers do not suffer from too much design patterns, or too much SOLID, or agile, or waterfall for that matter. They suffer from whipping out cowboy code in a pure chaos environment, using simplistic drag & drop, data driven, vb-like techniques.  

And Jeff responds:

Absolutely.

But here's the paradox: the types of programmers who would most benefit from these guidelines, rules, principles, and checklists are the least likely to read and follow them. Throwing a book of rules at a terrible programmer just creates a terrible programmer with a bruise on their head where the book bounced off

He's basically that we can't help the people that aren't interested in learning.  And I think thats true to some extent.  The problem is, he wants to throw up his hands and not help everyone else.  They'll just "figure it out" on their own somehow.

My first career programming was done in Coldfusion.  After working on a few web projects, I became dismayed out how quickly things deteriorated into what would now be considered "spaghetti code".  Of course, at the time I didn't know that the code was the problem.  I thought maybe the vendors would eventually come out with better tools or a better IDE to manage all this complexity. 

Instead, my friend and co-worker Ashe, came across a methodology for Coldfusion, called "Fusebox."  Fusebox was a set of rules and conventions for structuring your web application.  I wasn't even Layered or MVC or Object-Oriented or anything like that, although there were some shared principles, such as separating your data access code into separate files.  Mostly it was bringing structured programming to a procedural environment and some naming conventions.   After I started using Fusebox for a while, the light bulb (ha ha) went off in my head.  "The real problem," I thought, "is not the tools or the IDE or the Coldfusion language.  The real problem...is ME!"

After that I was hooked.  Hooked on not just learning new tools or syntax or libraries from vendors, but on improving myself as a programmer, on improving my craft.  When I migrated my skills to .NET, I kept trying to not only absorb syntax, but also OOP, layered design, patterns anything that would help me tame the chaos that is always at our heels when writing code.

Yes there are those that will never learn and don't want to learn.  I'd like to think that they are in the minority, but probably not.  But there are also some who just need some guidance, some little push in the right direction, and aren't there yet.  And there's a lot of us that really want to improve that are hungry to become better at their craft.

I can tell that i'm not nearly done yet.  I have been coding professionally for almost 10 years now, and I can tell that I still have a lot to learn.  Frankly, I can tell I'm not near where a lot of the Codebetter guys are, in overall knowledge and skill.  I'm certainly no uncle Bob or Martin Fowler.  I wish i could learn faster, but its hard with a family and bills to pay.  But I'm always trying.

For those of that want to be learning, we really need Design Patterns, SOLID, TDD, DDD, Agile, OOP and the rest.   OOP has helped me so much with complex business logic.  I'll probably never do another work flow application without some strategy or state pattern.  MVC has helped me make sense of how to better structure web applications.  Domain Driven Design has really helped me figure out how to structure large enterprise development with databases.  How did I learn about all this stuff?  I read books.  I read blogs.  I asked questions.  In essence, I took from the knowledge of those that came before me.  Yes its a lot to learn and I still don't have it all down.  But each piece I absorb is another notch in my belt that makes me a better programmer. 

Jeff also talks about marketing and relgion, and I agree there's a lot of that in the programming community and also a lot of the agile and alt.net world.  But there's also marketing that's been coming out of Microsoft and other vendors, as well as hundreds of "24 hours to learning Foo Programming" books that seem to suggest that if you learn a few drag and drop techniques and some basic syntax, you can be a professional programmer.  Just recently, a friend of mine who was learning .NET for the first time was asking me some questions about data access and code behind and I started talking about OOP and ORMs and layered applications.  He said "None of the books on .NET teach you any of that!"  He's right of course.  Part of this is natural.  If you are reading beginners book you're unlikely to hear about something like Repository Pattern or Separation of Concerns.  But some of this is because this is how the vendors market programming. 

There's no paradox Jeff.  All these "Rules and Regulations" are here for those of us that want to find them.  Certainly we all need them.  Yes there will be some that remain oblivious.  There will be some that have it sink in only a little.  There will also be some who really start absorbing it to become professional programmers.

So I feel we need other voices standing up as professionals to balance out the natural apathy as well as the bad marketing that comes from vendors.  As others have already mentioned, our industry is so young.  Every other industry has a deep set of rules, guidelines and principles to work off, even if they break them once in a while.   Right now, we need people shouting out principles and better ways of doing things in the hopes that some people who get hit the with the book will turn and look around and see whats up.   Stop coding for a second, and start learning how to be a coder!