[Jach]

Thanks for the pointer to Ousterhout, I don't think I've heard of him before but a lot of the Tcl people have put out good stuff.

Uncle Bob and friends definitely form their own "school". I think they call the "functions and assignment" style "Newspaper style", since for them it's kind of like reading a newspaper. Following it you can actually get a long way towards the dream of "self documenting code". I'm happy when people who believe in some specific school of thought get it to work for them, and even if I disagree on things at least there's consistency.

It's still never as clear as a literate program, though. And while Uncle Bob has been upgrading by learning Clojure, a lot of that school's work has assumed OO-in-the-style-of-Java5/C++98 environments. And to be fair that's a lot of the mass of legacy code we unhappily get saddled with. I think their work is less applicable and there are other schools to listen to when you have different languages or programming methods (FP, declarative, OO with a MOP, etc.).

I read the Clean Code book finally not too long ago, and while I've never argued with a book so much, there is value in it, and some programmers would do much better than their current flailing to follow its approach exactly. But these guys aren't my personal programming heroes, I'd rather be like a Norvig than a Jeffries (even if the latter is a perfectly acceptable engineer). But I can usually find value in all their works; philosophically I'm aligned with Bruce Lee, I'll take what I think is valuable and discard the rest.