"Unless he is certain of doing as well, he will probably do best to follow the rules." - Strunk, The Elements of Style Your advice is unfortunately common but

"Unless he is certain of doing as well, he will probably do best to follow the rules." - Strunk, The Elements of Style Your advice is unfortunately common but misguided. Without a firm and intuitive grasp of "rules" and why they exist, one cannot build a framework for making decisions with which one can use their judgment. On top of that, most programmers aren't advanced enough to have more reliable judgment than "the rules" and few working groups can possibly survive a bunch of programmers "using their judgment" all over a nontrivial codebase even when those programmers are that advanced.