I think that even the most "pretentious" opinions are worth learning about, but people need to have the confidence to go their own way and do their own thing wh

I think that even the most "pretentious" opinions are worth learning about, but people need to have the confidence to go their own way and do their own thing when an opinion doesn't make sense to them. In programming, there are very few things that are objectively bad, and even then what's "bad" is often limited to who will be working on a given project. The best example at the top of my mind is semicolons in JavaScript. Opinions on semicolons seem to have changed a lot since I began to seriously learn JavaScript. I remember most people saying to "always use semicolons" without really explaining why. Some of the more seasoned developers would point out a few reasons why not using semicolons could lead to issues, yet even though one with a fair amount of knowledge about how JavaScript is interpreted could simply avoid those issues in the first place, people would still use said reasons to label semicolonless JavaScript code as "objectively bad". It didn't even matter to these people whether the code actually worked perfectly well, or if the code was just as readable, or if it was the preference of the authors of the code. The zealotry towards semicolons entered the point of obvious signaling of senority; most of these people just came off as pretentious and unhelpful. If someone says you shouldn't do something, but what you want to do makes perfect sense to you, go ahead and do it. You might run into issues, or you might have no problems at all. I use semicolons in JavaScript today, but I never had problems when I used to write it without semicolons despite how I was told by everyone that it was "dangerous".