Against best practices
I have come to believe that by and large “best practices” are doing more harm than good. Not necessarily because they’re bad advice as such, but because they’re mostly pounded by either 1) various types of zealots, idiots, and assholes who abuse these kind of “best practices” as an argument from authority, or 2) inexperienced programmers who lack the ability to judge the applicability,
Everyone else just says “X is better because Y”. This is an actual argument that can be engaged with, and engaging with actual arguments is what discovers the best solution for the situation at hand.
This is not unique to programming; even the best of ideas becomes silly once you start uncritically applying it to everything – one can find many examples in politics. There, too, it’s mostly pounded by various types of zealots, idiots, and assholes.
All of this doesn’t mean that “best practice” are bad advice. Many are worth reading, and some should always be followed. But many are little more “this thing someone said” and/or “just someone’s opinion”.
