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I can't say I agree with much in this article. There are organizations like the IEEE which are publishing state of the art documents like the Software Engineeri

I can't say I agree with much in this article. There are organizations like the IEEE which are publishing state of the art documents like the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge[0] that collect "best practices" together. The weakest arguments against best practices, to me, is a pedantic argument. There isn't a "best" practice there is only a state of the art. Structured programming in its infancy, for example, was not widely adopted and not considered in the state of the art until programming languages adopted its ideas and went into widespread use. During that time it was still the state of the art to write code with goto. Perhaps I'm alone in this but I don't think most people confuse, "It is best practice to avoid character requirements in validating passwords," with "this is the objectively best way to validate passwords." They mean, "this is the best way we know how," and are referring to guidelines like the NIST SP 800-63 publication on digitial identity management. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Engineering_Body_of_Knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Engineering_Body_of_K...

Retric 6y ago
An old idea was programs could lean to read only code or write only code. The concept was making programs easier to work with took extra effort. Best practices in that context aren’t objectively better so it’s really not about state of the art. Rather their about understanding what you give up by doing something else. Goto’s can actually be really useful, their simply not worth it today. It’s a subtle yet important distinction.
AnimalMuppet 6y ago
But that's always been the definition of "best practices". It sounds like your issue is not with the article, but with the term itself.
sushisource 6y ago
> Perhaps I'm alone in this but I don't think most people confuse, "It is best practice to avoid character requirements in validating passwords," with "this is the objectively best way to validate passwords." Unfortunately you have been quite lucky. The phenomenon of blindly following whatever some blog post said is all too real.
- npsimons 6y ago
  > Unfortunately you have been quite lucky. The phenomenon of blindly following whatever some blog post said is all too real. Second this. I have no issues with trying to improve things, and that especially includes meta things like processes. What I take issue with is that the very word, "best", heavily implies there is one and only one "correct" way to do things.
mbrodersen 6y ago
In my experience, bad developers simply follow whatever is popular/“best practice”/“state of the art” without thinking about and balancing short term/long term pros/cons, the business model, customers etc. The results are pretty bad. Cargo Cult thinking is real.

Retric 6y ago

An old idea was programs could lean to read only code or write only code. The concept was making programs easier to work with took extra effort. Best practices in that context aren’t objectively better so it’s really not about state of the art. Rather their about understanding what you give up by doing something else. Goto’s can actually be really useful, their simply not worth it today. It’s a subtle yet important distinction.

AnimalMuppet 6y ago

But that's always been the definition of "best practices". It sounds like your issue is not with the article, but with the term itself.

sushisource 6y ago

> Perhaps I'm alone in this but I don't think most people confuse, "It is best practice to avoid character requirements in validating passwords," with "this is the objectively best way to validate passwords." Unfortunately you have been quite lucky. The phenomenon of blindly following whatever some blog post said is all too real.

npsimons 6y ago
> Unfortunately you have been quite lucky. The phenomenon of blindly following whatever some blog post said is all too real. Second this. I have no issues with trying to improve things, and that especially includes meta things like processes. What I take issue with is that the very word, "best", heavily implies there is one and only one "correct" way to do things.

mbrodersen 6y ago

In my experience, bad developers simply follow whatever is popular/“best practice”/“state of the art” without thinking about and balancing short term/long term pros/cons, the business model, customers etc. The results are pretty bad. Cargo Cult thinking is real.