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by alganet 350 days ago
You need to understand that Mr. Fowler works for a consultancy.

LLMs sound great for consultants. A messy hyped technology that you can charge to pretend to fix? Jackpot.

All things these consultancies eventually promote are learnings they had with their own clients.

The OOP patterns he described in the past likely came from observing real developers while being in this consultant role, and _trying_ to document how they overcame typical problems of the time.

I have a feeling that the real people with skin on the game (not consultants) that came up with that stuff would describe it in much simpler terms.

Similarly, it is likely that some of these posts are based on real experience but "consultancified" (made vague and more complex than it needs to be).

1 comments

I'm a bit too lazy to check, but didn't he leave thoughtworks?

Apropos of nothing I saw him speak once at a corporate shindig and I didn't get the impression that he enjoyed it very much. Some of the engineering management were being super weird about him being a (very niche) famous person too...

https://martinfowler.com/aboutMe.html

> [...] I work for Thoughtworks [...]

> [...] I don't come up with original ideas, but do a pretty good job of recognizing and packaging the ideas of others [...]

> [...] I see my main role as helping my colleagues to capture and promulgate what we've learned about software development to help our profession improve. We've always believed that this openness helps us find clients, recruit the best people, and help our clients succeed. [...]

So, we should read him as such. It's a consultant, trying to capture what successful teams do. Sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing.

Yeah, seems I was misremembering - looks like he just doesn't do talks any more.