Developers end up at local maxima because a whole bunch of practices add up to a working system. It's a mistake to champion any single practice without understa

Developers end up at local maxima because a whole bunch of practices add up to a working system. It's a mistake to champion any single practice without understanding how it fits into an ecosystem: time budget, testing, language features available, efficiency, tolerance for errors, imposed deadlines, third-party technical ecosystem, etc. It's all about the system where they all work together. To truly suggest something as a best practice, you need to understand what it requires from the technical and social environment around it, and when it applies and doesn't apply. We're nowhere near that level of discipline as a field. This lack of discipline is why we wince when we hear that a startup is implementing something like voting machines: we know the financial incentives that lead to startups focusing on speed, and we can imagine the discipline that voting systems require. We know there's a mismatch between the social environment and the likely project management approach. But we're blind to the social and technical requirements that allow other practices to work well. When is it appropriate to use inheritance? Someone will inevitably say, "You shouldn't use it?" Why does it work so well in Rails? IMO it's how developers like John Carmack[0] and Martin Fowler[1] can make opposite arguments about things like the benefits of having code inline or in functions. These two opinions work in conjunction with their environments; maybe video game and aerospace coding requires budgeted performance requires mutability, so Carmack has to control how you interleave side-effects. Maybe enterprise-grade Java programming doesn't have much of a performance budget at all, or maybe he values isolating testable functions more, so Fowler can take other approaches that allow more "readable" styles and not worry so much about side effects (since there are few). [0] http://number-none.com/blow/john_carmack_on_inlined_code.html http://number-none.com/blow/john_carmack_on_inlined_code.htm... [1] https://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/FunctionLength.html https://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/FunctionLength.html