Clean Architecture: A Craftsman's Guide to Software Structure and Design

by Robert C. Martin

It’s coding turtles all the way down.

Dijkstra took a job with the Mathematical Center of Amsterdam as the Netherlands’ very first programmer.

Non-embedded engineers also write firmware! You non-embedded developers essentially write firmware whenever you bury SQL in your code or when you spread platform dependencies throughout your code. Android app developers write firmware when they don’t separate their business logic from the Android API.

We’ve seen several of these oscillations just in the last decade or so since the web became prominent. At first we thought all the computer power would be in server farms, and the browsers would be stupid. Then we started putting applets in the browsers. But we didn’t like that, so we moved dynamic content back to the servers. But then we didn’t like that, so we invented Web 2.0 and moved lots of processing back into the browser with Ajax and JavaScript. We went so far as to create whole huge applications written to execute in the browsers. And now we’re all excited about pulling that JavaScript back into the server with Node. (Sigh.)

And so it was that, after rising to the lofty ranks of “software architect”—and then “lead architect,” “chief architect,” “Lord Architect of the Privy Council,” and all the other highfalutin titles we gave ourselves back in the day—I seemed doomed to spend my days connecting boxes with arrows and coding with PowerPoint, and having barely any impact on the real code itself. It struck me then that this was nonsense; every line of code contains at least one design decision, and therefore anyone who writes code has a much greater impact on the quality of the software than a PowerPoint jockey like me ever could. And then, thankfully, the Agile Software Development revolution arrived and put architects like me out of our misery. I’m a programmer. I like programming. And the best way I’ve found to have a positive impact on code is to write it.