I'm very skeptical of the idea that we can use principles to effectively instill the practices we hope to capture of a well functioning engineering team. Wittge

I'm very skeptical of the idea that we can use principles to effectively instill the practices we hope to capture of a well functioning engineering team. Wittgenstein was right that language is given meaning by its use. Any principle has a context that assigns meaning to the words and sentences we use, and in an engineering culture that context is the practices of a team. When we try to lean on short principles and reiteration of them to steer our practices, we encourage a simplistic understanding of complex topics with many corner cases. I can think of dozens of instances where dogmatic understanding of ideas like DRY, YAGNI, etc. lead to poor decisions by teams I've worked with. These are turns of phrase that have a specific context of use, but when we divorce them of that or rely on the phraseology to produce the phenomena we value, the concepts get corrupted.