I think the problem is not that you shouldn't think things through with academic rigor. The problem is that there is so much cargo cult junk in programming as

I think the problem is not that you shouldn't think things through with academic rigor. The problem is that there is so much cargo cult junk in programming as a field that it's impossible for a novice to discern the pseudo-engineering crap from the truly beneficial concepts. Beyond the core algorithms and data structures whose mastery should be kinda obligatory if you want to implement anything in production, it is impossible for a novice to tell what he should ingrain in his daily work and what he should not. The advice given here is therefore is very good. Get practical experience in building things, so you identify the beneficial abstractions when you learn of them, and have courage abandon those that do not provide value. The downside is the "expert beginner" who learns a one way to do a thing and thinks it's well and good to do it that way for all eternity. Higher level languages are fantastic because they offer efficient and practical abstractions out of the box for the "patterns" you would implement yourself in a half-assed way in a lower level language like c. People infatuated with solutions finding a problem are kinda bad from a communication point of view. They are so a plenty that when one tries to offer practical higher level solutions to existing problems the listener often thinks this is motivated out of love for the solution and not out of love for the problem.