in reply to Best practices, revisited
When I used to train developers, I spent quite a bit of time on our standard practices. The argument that I finally settled on was paraphrased from a mentor of mine.
There are an infinite number of "solutions" to any programming problem. Most of them are wrong. Of the remainder, there are still a huge number (probably infinite) number of "right" answers. The purpose of the rules is to reduce the number of minor, useless variations in the solutions, so you can focus on the good solutions.
(Or, something to that effect. I don't think I've taught that class in about a decade.)
In most of the problems I have had to solve, any given set of best practices would not have altered the important part of the solution.
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