After reading this article, the theory that comes to mind is that "best practices" not just developer preferences - rather, "best practices" is cargo culting by

After reading this article, the theory that comes to mind is that "best practices" not just developer preferences - rather, "best practices" is cargo culting by mediocre programmers, trying to copy techniques that a really skilled programmer once employed to do amazing things. This is the part of the article that made me think this: >As I type this, I’m in a discussion about whether it’s better to pass a few unnecessary parameters to simplify a bash script’s internal logic or pass fewer parameters and make the bash script more complex. This sounds like they're on the verge of parameterized, object-capability design - passing in the paths to operate on, rather than hardcoding some internal logic to determine what to do. If you do this in the right places and at the right time, you can do amazing stuff, reuse scripts in totally novel environments and for novel purposes. At other times, it's not necessary. But I'm guessing neither side really knows how to use that to do amazing stuff. Some programmers don't have the skill to recognize when a specific technique is justified or unjustified. So, unmoored from technical reality, they just argue about cultural norms - blindly copy what someone else did once, which brought someone else success - cargo culting. That all sounds very mean, but if this is what's actually going on, I'm not sure what the solution is. Maybe more focus on really impressive and amazing concrete projects, rather than just individual practices in isolation?