I absolutely agree with you, but I'd like to point out that singling out "young programmers" here does not do this topic justice.

This also goes for certain programmers that have been in the industry for decades. And if you deal with one of those, you'll find that they are even less likely to change their practices, so I'll take an impressionable young programmer to convince any day of the week.

Of course, this topic extends to many other practices, such as using descriptive variable names, writing good comments and documentation (instead of the Captain Obvious approved ones), designing good APIs,…