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Re:Why bad scientific code beats code following “best practi... by Retra on Sunday August 28, 2016 @02:50PM (#12377855)
I think it's more that the best practices were adopted for specific reasons, but they are not understood or transmitted in a way that makes those reasons very clear. That is, a 'best practice' tends to solve a specific kind of problem under a certain set of constraints.

Nobody remembers what the original constraints are or if they even apply in their current situation, even if they are actually trying to solve the same problem, which they might not be.

Re:Why bad scientific code beats code following “best practi... by RobertKerans on Sunday August 28, 2016 @06:54PM (#12378927)
This spirals as well: I've spent quite a lot of time recently helping people at the early stages of learning programming, and it's taken me a while to stop becoming frustrated with their misunderstandings. Sometimes it is just because something basic isn't clicking for them, but a lot of the time it's down to me trying to explain things through a prism of accumulated patterns that are seen as best practise/common sense, but stepping back and viewing objectively are opaque and sometimes nonsensical outside of very specific scenarios. There's a tendency to massively overcomplicate, but you forget very quickly how complicated, then you build further patterns to deal with the complexity, ad infinitum
Re:Why bad scientific code beats code following “best practi... by JamesBarney on Monday August 29, 2016 @12:21PM (#12382943)
Yep the biggest issue we have with software is every developer knows Single Responsibility Principle, and no developers know why. Everyone knows decouple and increase cohesion, but few any know what cohesion is.