[HN Gopher] How I came to write "Tidy First?" tl;dr it took 18 y...
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How I came to write "Tidy First?" tl;dr it took 18 years
Author : KentBeck
Score : 84 points
Date : 2023-03-21 14:49 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (tidyfirst.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (tidyfirst.substack.com)
| chmod600 wrote:
| Off-topic, but the writing style seems to use "&" excessively.
| Did anyone else find that disruptive?
| dang wrote:
| Some people like it. I would find it annoying except they used
| to do it all the time in the 18th century and it's kind of fun
| that an old convention came back.
| codetrotter wrote:
| > Some people like it & I would find it annoying except they
| used to do it all the time in the 18th century & it's kind of
| fun that an old convention came back.
|
| FT&FY
| plorkyeran wrote:
| Obviously it's fallen out of fashion, but it is/was just a
| shorthand way of writing "and" & it used to be pretty normal to
| just use it every time. It's not really something you can use
| "excessively"; either you write "and" as "&" or you don't.
| einpoklum wrote:
| [flagged]
| topaz0 wrote:
| Others have refuted the "--someone not famous" part of your
| shallow dismissal so I won't go there, but also my
| understanding from the post is that "few people know about" is
| because the book isn't published yet.
| belfalas wrote:
| Just to pile on - Kent Beck was one of the authors of JUnit.
| His credentials are pretty solid.
| neilv wrote:
| Kent Beck's work is important to the field of software,
| starting since before techbros were a thing, and ongoing.
|
| When a field becomes known as a "get rich quick" career, and
| there's a massive influx people into the field... it's a little
| sadly-funny to realize that more people in the field know the
| names of people who got the most rich, than know the names of
| people who helped get the field itself to that point (through
| craft/avocation/research/etc.).
| scrame wrote:
| See also: Alan Kays comment on software engineering pop
| culture.
| neilv wrote:
| HN comment thread from 2012:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4956430
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other
| people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| UK-Al05 wrote:
| Kent beck is an incredibly famous software engineer.
|
| Invented XP, and the wrote the most well known book on TDD.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| His own writings aren't that bad but he's the Dr. Oz to the
| agile-charlatans. (e.g. Dr. Oz had to explain to Congress
| that he had no idea whatsoever why his face was on so many
| ads for scam weight loss products.)
| UK-Al05 wrote:
| XP at the time was pretty good. A lot of people started
| doing CI of the back of XP.
|
| I'd say he's pretty sad about how agile turned out. Its
| pretty different to what XP advocated for in a lot of
| organisations.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The thing is the agile-charlatans copied his style for
| talking about how programming teams should be organized.
| blast wrote:
| That's the charlatans' fault, not Kent's.
| neilv wrote:
| I managed to attend a few book-signings of great authors (Salman
| Rushdie, Richard Dawkins, and, long ago, Beverly Cleary), but
| would kill for this Yourdon-Constantine one, as well as the story
| behind it.
|
| I actually worked for a CASE vendor that started by building
| tools to apply Yourdon et al.'s Structured Analysis and
| Structured Design to important systems, in mil/aerospace/datacom.
| (I was lucky to be the teen mascot on our full-lifecycle
| evolution of those tools, in the Portland division, and then on
| an R&D team at HQ for next-gen OO CASE.)
|
| Yourdon also collaborated with Peter Coad on a pair of books for
| OO development.
|
| To this day, I still find Yourdon et al.'s DFDs (from Structured
| Analysis) to be one of the first and most powerful tools for
| eliciting process/system understanding, from business people and
| techies alike, even if they've never seen it. Put loosely, it
| seems half of all business/org problems lately could be solved by
| leading people through a DFD exercise.
| ojbyrne wrote:
| I got to meet Ed Yourdon several years ago (he came to interview
| me, amazingly). No one else at the company knew who he was.
| catskul2 wrote:
| What's "Tidy First"? Is this a book I should have heard of?
| nextos wrote:
| I think this link to an event his publisher is organizing
| discusses some relevant context to understand the post:
| https://www.oreilly.com/live-events/software-architecture-ho...
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| The author of this piece is Kent Beck, who has written on
| software before.
| https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/25211.Kent_Beck
|
| He is one of the "Agile Manifesto" people: his name is on this
| page https://agilemanifesto.org/
|
| His books are rightly well-known. He appears to be discussing
| his upcoming new book. It doesn't seem to be out yet.
| scrame wrote:
| ooooh. yeah he wrote the book on Test Driven Development.
|
| I had the same question initially, I thought tidy first was
| one of those home keeping books.
| throwaway2729 wrote:
| Could be a useful book for ChatGPT to read
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(page generated 2023-03-22 23:00 UTC)