I wish there were (more?) people who feel about software like Steve Wozniak feels about hardware. Because it is an art, a pursuit of perfection. And not slamming frameworks, libraries and snippets together until something kind of runs sometimes.
I think it's a bit different. Woz saw the great potential for the hardware he was making, and said that the only thing he wanted was a computer, something he actually wanted to use. With that motivation and excitement I can see how you'd want it to be perfect.
I'd say I wish more people had things they were so passionate about that what they were making felt to them it was more than just 'software', or 'hardware'. If you are making a product purely to make money, I don't think this mindset would be there, but if the product exists as something bigger (in Apples case, Jobs saw it as a 'bicycle for your mind', it wasn't just a computer). I like to think if you allowed the people just slamming libraries together till something runs something they were truly passionate about, things may play out differently. But iono :p
Also, it becomes much more clear in this video--for me at least--why he and Jobs hit it off. They both had almost a fundamental need to make it the best it could possibly be both inside and out. There's a lot to be said for developing that kind of attitude.
I suspect a lot of us had the ideal, and it got beaten out of you somewhere during your first job.
In a sense, Woz was incredibly lucky to be able to success that early, and never lost the childhood sense of wanting perfection and playful. And as someone else mentioned, Jobs is also a perfection-seeking type of personality, which helped alot - most of the "business guys" nowadays couldn't careless about that. At best you'd hope that your business partner care about how the product looks like, let alone the code behide it.
It's hard to keep your head down to produce good code, when the business side constantly remind you that customers don't really give a shit about the code, they just want it to run.
There are. But by and far you won't find them in the startup circles. I've personally found them in universities and art schools (if you're surprised by the latter, take a peak at creativeapplications.net).
Yeah, what's missing is a software build by Robert Martin that is used and admired by several people.
Considering software is much more easily distributable than hardware makes the fact that there is none works against him.
Robert Martin may be good at Marketing, but I've never seen something from him that I liked.
Closer to Woz would be people who ACTUALLY shipped working code (Linus Torvalds as an example) then people who like to complain about code not having enough test coverage
So yeah, I hold no respect for this "Uncle Bob" guy
I wish there were (more?) people who feel about software like Steve Wozniak feels about hardware. Because it is an art, a pursuit of perfection.
Didn't mention anything about shipping popular software, so I'm not sure where you're getting that metric from, but it's completely irrelevant to what OP was describing, and uncle bob fits OP's description perfectly. His talks show how passionate he is about code as a craft, and how he wants to strive for perfection. The popularity of his code doesn't take away from that (not to mention that Jobs played a significant role on Woz's end for that, so it's not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison either). The fact that Martin has good rationales to support his ideas is just an added bonus in that regard. I get the impression that he's disliked more just because people have a fear of falling into the 'java culture' than because of his actual arguments.
Also, Linus is nothing like Woz other than their shipping of popular products. Nothing against the guy, I'm sure we're all grateful for his work, but he doesn't seem to display the same kind of childlike wonderment of his craft like woz does.
