I don't know if it's because of clean code or because he calls himself my uncle or what else, but he's always rubbed me the wrong way.

I always ask people to think about printed pages and they look at me as if I'm crazy... But it's like, if you have to pick up a reference book or something, carefully find the right section addressing your problem, you want to read it, how many pages do you want to read at a sitting? For most the answer is ideally 1 but you can read 2-3 and still not get annoyed, right? If it gets longer than 10 then that's doable but not what you signed up for. Well if I print code onto those pages, and just assume that most of English lines are kind of filler which programming languages don't have, so no compression due to the sparseness of code, then you get ~40 LOC on a textbook page, ideally you would solve a problem in 40 LOC but if it took 120 LOC that is still perfectly readable, it's when it gets to 400+ish that something has really started to get confusing about the structure.

Same with diffs, 400-line diff is still reviewable, but barely.

The printed page isn't the point, the point is that these are kind of objective numbers, if I describe them in printed pages everybody seems to agree on these numbers... But then a book like Clean Code comes around, people want to have these tiny little scraps of an eighth of a page, bound together in a little flip book of half-index-card strips each pointing at other strips, “bake the pizza (see strip 37)”, and nobody thinks about whether this is actually an informational presentation mode that anybody really wants to use. “It works better for review time because you encourage only reviewing one or two pages of flip book at a time.” Yeah Bob I see what you're saying but, like, is this my “crazy uncle” now who insists that the usual book is going away because with the advent of Wikipedia and infinite content feeds all knowledge and story will forever be stored in such flipbooks? Just because editors who don't care about the overall story anymore because their attention span are shot to hell find it easier to review half an index card at a time? This is a good thing? Something feels off!

You get this same argument from people who believe in the layered server architecture. “Business logic needs to go in the business layer, database logic in the data access layer, presentation logic in the view layer, routing logic in the controller layer.” but you would never voluntarily read a book that was structured this way! “Matt saw Alice sitting there, a young girl of maybe 16, gorgeous in her melancholy and disaffected way, an old schoolmate of his. He waved. She beckoned. He said “Hi, how are you?” and she replied...” Right, the author gave you a data structure of adjectives to associate with Alice, you didn't have to flip to the Characters section looking for “ALICE_INTRODUCTION” and wade through all of the different ways she appears in the book to find “when Matt first sees her she is melancholy and gorgeous” and then flip all the way back to the story that you were reading, then flip to the Dialogue section looking for MATT_ALICE_INTRO_DIALOGUE, hope you left a bookmark back in the Main Story section back there! “Oh, but it is so easy to read the whole book if you can skim through the Main Plot part of the book without ever knowing anything about the characters or settings or repercussions or dialogue, “Matt saw Alice (ALICE_INTRO), she beckoned, they talked (MATT_ALICE_INTRO_DIALOGUE), he walked to the diner...”. And if you complain about the big all caps stuff someone says “well in a modern hypertext reader, those just become links and you never need to see them directly!” except you do because you have to maintain it... And it's like, I get it! You can probably compress most modern novels considerably if you remove all their descriptions
and dialogue to appendices, it's not wrong! But writing is so much slower in that format, debugging is surprisingly so much slower in that format, the things that are faster are queries like “Did Alice ever mention her father to Matt in the recorded dialogue?” and then you make a refactoring change on the basis that Matt should not know anything about Alice's father and then it turns out that it generated a plot hole because somewhere in the Exposition layer the two were connected more obliquely, Alice wrote about it in a post-it on the fridge or something, that she was going to see her father who was ill.