I think this advice is for people who don't necessarily need it. I don't know if there's a name for it, but I've started reading "Don't do X" as "Don't do X un

I think this advice is for people who don't necessarily need it. I don't know if there's a name for it, but I've started reading "Don't do X" as "Don't do X unless you have a realllllly good reason to." Nothing in life is absolute, after all. Similar advice is "Use a GC". There are (similar) use cases where you shouldn't use a GC. But if you don't have a strong case for paying the price of not using a GC (in terms of potential bugs and code complexity), then using a GC by default is pretty good advice. But yeah, if you're writing VMWare, you're hopefully also skilled enough in the domain to know that you should try to get maximum performance. But if you're writing some shell scripts or webapp, a lot of the time your bit-twiddling optimisations will be noise relative to the variation from I/O alone.