Yeah he's no Zed Shaw. But actually I think Fowler is... well he skips a lot of steps and makes a lot of assertions. Here's an excerpt from the intro to Refactoring:

> The performance of software usually depends on just a few parts of the code, and changes anywhere else don't make an appreciable difference.

> But "mostly" isn't "alwaysly." Sometimes a refactoring will have a significant performance implication. Even then, I usually go ahead and do it, because it's much easier to tune the performance of well-factored code. If I introduce a significant performance issue during refactoring, I spend time on performance tuning afterwards. It may be that this leads to reversing some of the refactoring I did earlier--but most of the time, due to the refactoring, I can apply a more effective performance-tuning enhancement instead. I end up with code that's both clearer and faster.

> So my overall advice on performance with refactoring is: Most of the time you should ignore it. If your refactoring introduces performance slow-downs, finish refactoring first and do performance tuning afterwards.

One way to read this is basically what he writes: clear code is more important than efficient code, and clear code can help you make code more efficient if that's important.

Another way--indeed the way I read it--is "performance isn't the most important thing, and at least some of the time following my advice, performance will suffer, even if you undo a lot of the work I'm recommending you do." And I can respect that, but what he writes tries to have it both ways. At least when DHH makes this argument, he basically just says "yeah, buy more machines, they're cheap, engineers aren't." This "incidental" absence of drawbacks is just one of the things that makes all of Fowler's writing feel like marketing.

Another is all the hand waving assertions. There's a lot of it even in those three short paragraphs:

- How did he measure "much easier to tune the performance of well-factored code"? Honestly how would you even measure that?

- How did he measure "more effective performance-tuning enhancement", and also what does "effective" mean?

- What does "well-factored" mean?

- What does "clearer" mean when he says "I end up with code that's both clearer and faster"

Further, he reinvents and renames things. His (short) article about "Application Boundary" [1] is actually Conway's Law [2], which was nearly 40 years old at writing. And OK, no one knows everything. But that piece is written very prescriptively; here's an excerpt:

> We can draw application boundaries in hundred arbitrarily different ways. But it's our nature to group things together and organize groups of people around these groups. There's little science in how this works, and in many ways these boundaries are drawn primarily by human inter-relationships and politics rather than technical and functional considerations. To think about this more clearly I think we have to recognize this uncomfortable fact.

How can you say "there's little science in how this works" immediately after "it's in our nature to..."? And for what it's worth, there's plenty of work around this; look at any discussion of permission/capability systems, consensus systems, sandboxes, etc. There is literally science about it.

I have no doubt that Fowler is earnest and well-meaning, I appreciate his contributions to (what I reluctantly accept is) my field, and I'm happy that he's frequently many people's gateway to thinking more critically about software. But he's far from the final word on it, and too often he writes like he is.

And, at the risk of making an over-long post even longer, there are two problems with that. I've already been explicit about the first: people take it as gospel and don't look further. That's not great for our field.

But even worse, it ends up changing our culture from one of wonder, exploration, and experimentation to one of prescription and certitude. I have no idea what the best way to factor a program is; it's very hard for me (or anyone) to say why one expression of information or a computation is "better" than another, and that is an endless source of delight for me. God help me the day I figure it all out.

[1]: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/ApplicationBoundary.html

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law