No problem. And I agree almost completely: I don't think those caveats are obvious to a junior (or otherwise inexperienced) developer. Maybe some of them are o

No problem. And I agree almost completely: I don't think those caveats are obvious to a junior (or otherwise inexperienced) developer. Maybe some of them are obvious, but I don't think anyone runs into these enough daily that programming by dogma actually helps. And yet I do see value if there are rules! Why should we think about having "good variable names" or not if most of the time "good variable names" don't cause much harm, and most of the time not having them does? It's just that I don't think this is a real problem; I don't believe anyone actually makes that choice. I think if something doesn't have "good variable names" (as an example), then it's possible someone was programming who couldn't think of good ones (to which the rule wouldn't help anyway), and it's possible that these are good variable names, and that it's our opinion that is wrong (perhaps because we don't yet understand what we're looking at). NB) I'm not saying both are equally likely. To put it another way, how can one recommend programming by brute force, "as long as you've got "readability" and "popular" libraries, and "code reuse" and "good variable names" and so on... What can we possibly add to that list that will be even a good substitute for a few decades of experience successfully delivering software?