He follows this up with: > Don’t code “your way”. Just follow the coding standards. This stuff is already figured out. Make your code predictable and easy to r

He follows this up with: > Don’t code “your way”. Just follow the coding standards. This stuff is already figured out. Make your code predictable and easy to read by coding the way people expect. I'm not a C dev, but is "(null != thing)" still a convention? (Based on your comment it sounds like yes). If yes, it seems to me like he's saying: keep doing that! Nowhere does he claim that his advice about this convention applies to every language (this would be silly) and not writing C should not preclude someone from giving programming advice. The "generally applicable" advice that he does give is exactly that: general. Is it possible to write a blog post about code quality/complexity/insert-thing-here that applies to all circumstances? I don't believe it is. It doesn't mean that there is no value to be gained from exploring concepts that may apply.