The server was weeping, the codebase was sick,
The functions were bulky, the classes too thick!
A spaghetti monster had swallowed the screen,
With variables dirty and logic obscene.
Then out of the clouds, with a halo of white,
Stepped Uncle Bob Martin, the Apostle of Light!

He carried two tablets of polished oak wood:
“Thou shalt not write code that is merely just good!
Repent of your loops! Drop your dirty else clause!
For I bring the holy, unchangeable laws!
The Boy Scout is here with a broom and a mop,
And until you refactor, no coffee, no stop!”

“A function,” he bellowed, “must do just one thing!
It shouldn’t drink water, it shouldn’t dance, sing!
And if it has three lines, it’s bloated with sin!
Chop two lines away, throw them straight in the bin!
If you need an if-statement, you’ve failed as a man—
Replace it with fifty small classes that ran!

And names! What a horror! What sloppy design!
Don’t name a thing i, or data, or line!
Call it: TemporaryContextualUserDateSpanFactoryRegistryManagerPlan!
If your names aren’t a paragraph printed in red,
Then you might as well stay in your amateur bed!”

“Comments are failures!” he preached to the crowd,
His vein on his forehead pulsating and proud.
“If you leave an inline note to tell what you did,
You’re a cowardly slug and an ignorant kid!
Delete every summary, explanation, and note!
The code is the poem! The code is the boat!
If someone can’t read your abstractions in Greek,
Just fire that mortal, he’s hopelessly weak!”

No arguments either! “One argument’s fine,
Two is a crime against nature divine!
And three? That’s a blasphemy worthy of Hell!
Wrap them in objects and hide them real well!
Wrap x, y, and z in a PointHolderClass,
Then wrap that inside of a CoordinateMass!”

The SOLID Cathedral of Air
“Follow the S-O-L-I and the D!
The five golden letters that set mankind free!
Never use new! That is vulgar and crude!
Inject dependencies naked and nude!
Build thirty-six layers of pure Interface,
To calculate sales tax in one simple place!”

Now checking the time takes a hundred and four
Sub-factories spinning outside of the door: AbstractTimeProviderLocatorImpl,
Connecting to ClockObserverEntityMill!
The program does nothing, it freezes the RAM,
It crashes the browser, it stalls every dam—
“It runs at one frame every seven full hours,”
Cried the dev, “and it uses gigawatts of powers!”

“Who cares about performance?!” Bob cheered with delight,
“The code is immaculately, cleanly polite!
It’s decoupled, abstracted, and perfectly dry!
It doesn’t work, true, but it pleases the sky!”

× × ×

So praise the great guru of classes and mocks,
Who locked the whole industry inside a box!
The program is dead, not a feature will start,
But gaze at the purity! Marvel the art!
The screen is bone-white and the memory clean—
The emptiest garbage the world’s ever seen!