Yeah but I also believe it's important for beginners to learn by doing, even if it means doing wrong. There is no universal "good way" of doing software anyway

Yeah but I also believe it's important for beginners to learn by doing, even if it means doing wrong. There is no universal "good way" of doing software anyway and best practices and patterns can be harmful too. Take java spring or ruby on rails for example, those are opinionated ways of doing SW but they are also big pile of complexity and sometimes you really need just read a file, transform it a little and output the result. I think those awkward examples and hacks are valuable too because you get involved in internals and you know then how the entire thing works under the hood.