Here's an easy way to determine "reality". Find a large C program. Rewrite it so that none of the loops use break. How excited will the program's maintainers' be to receive your patch?

Clever, yet informative and to the point. I can't upvote you enough.

Generally, mention anything Dijkstra and you get the quick smackdown. And this has been going on since he was publishing. There was a big brouhaha when he was publishing that what he was proposing in the way of programming training wouldn't work because they were not culturally acceptable (?).

Some examples are http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=477177 or http://www.catonmat.net/blog/edsger-dijkstra-discipline-in-t..., both the article and the comments. I could go on.

And I would bet that if you watch this space you will see more of the same.

You mean, generally on a php mailing list?

I cannot imagine that somebody with at least rudimentary education in CS would concur with such a judgement.

This paper by ewd gives his overview of the industry and some of the reasons that "reality" seems out of step with good approaches.

And the url is http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/EW...

Really anywhere and not just php mailing list. Well, I would like to think that is the case but sadly it is not.