The no.1 piece of advice I give to junior programmers now, or any programmer trying to improve, is to care about your code, everything else can naturally and mo

The no.1 piece of advice I give to junior programmers now, or any programmer trying to improve, is to care about your code, everything else can naturally and more safely emerge from that one principle. The problem with laying down a bunch of arbitrary rules is that they never apply to all scenarios. As the person coming up with the rules you can easily re-evaluate where and when they don't work, but the novice receiving those rules wont necessarily have an intuition for the reasoning behind them yet, and so wont so considerately apply them. For everyone else, they need to understand that there is no silver bullet, no 10 commandments that will give them the best result, life is messy, and they need to think, develop their own intuitions by interrogating their own code in each new context - but it all starts with caring about your code, not being satisfied with a pile of spaghetti, or a pile of OOP just because OOP, or a pile of strictly pure functions just because FP. Every single rule or programming pattern is wrong given enough contexts, it's all subjective. Discussing patterns and rules is useful, but only if they are only used as a mental anchor to think about them, not some kind of axioms of programming correctness.