Six

So, I just finished reading Tidy first? by Kent Beck. I am underwhelmed.

First of all, I actually read the German translation, because it was for some reason 10 Euros cheaper than the original. Usually it is the other way around. I just had totally forgotten (or ignored against supposedely better knowledge?) that translations of technical material are nigh always a bit cringey to read, and how often I need to reverse-translate certain expressions and sentences to make sense of them. But that's on me, and let's keep stylistic questions out of the discussion.

The volume is slim, nothing that I didn't knew before ordering it. That is fine. It can be an asset even, if the content is deep. But the book consists of 33 comparatively superficial blog-post-style chapters that have been padded gratuitously with whitespace and blank pages. The tidying techniques are rather well-known, mostly uncontroversial transformations that most software engineers do on a daily basis. I assume that was part of the point Beck tried to make. The few (pseudo-)code examples are contrived and low-effort, I'd have appreciated examples out of the real world.

The theory part has some good points, but is mostly handwavy. Beck riffs a lot about financial options as a thinking model for design decisions, which reminded me of a similar idea in Gregor Hohpes The Software Architect Elevator. The rest could be summarized as software design is a wicked problem, as in: viewed from an economical model it is possible to suffer from both over- and underdoing it, but it is a matter of experience and intuition to know where the sweet spot is.