This seems like distorted thinking. Surely there is a balance to be struck between hyper-rigor and abandoned rigor. This guy seems to have an awareness of various best practices, but no sense of perspective about their relative importance.
I'm not a programmer (at least, I'm a very beginning one), so maybe someone can clue me in: Are all best practices equally destructive if you don't follow them? Or are there best practices which can be neglected?
I'd expect that the best practices being neglected would be differently relevant to different projects, types of application, customers, etc. Would it be productive to modify the discussions of "best practices" by talking about under which context those practices are necessary or unnecessary?
Your intuition is correct, not all best practices are equally important. e.g.
1. Business data should be stored in a proper relational database such as Postgres, with a well-normalized schema. This is critical; if you don't do it before the first day in production, inconsistent data will accrue and then it's too late to solve your problems just by fixing your code.
2. Your code should be well formatted, properly indented, with variable names that are informative but not too long. This will end up being important, but if you neglect it initially, you can fix it up later, so it doesn't have to be right upfront.
3. Your code should be commented where appropriate. This is good to have, but if you neglect it initially, you can add comments later, and even if you never get around to that, you can probably work well enough without them, so if you find you don't have time to write comments, don't sweat it.
For any practice whatsoever, you can find people who will insist it's do-or-die critical (I've seen people insist uncommented code needs to die in a fire along with its authors),so you have to use your judgment to distinguish between things where you have to make a stand and things you can let slip.
I'm not a programmer (at least, I'm a very beginning one), so maybe someone can clue me in: Are all best practices equally destructive if you don't follow them? Or are there best practices which can be neglected?
I'd expect that the best practices being neglected would be differently relevant to different projects, types of application, customers, etc. Would it be productive to modify the discussions of "best practices" by talking about under which context those practices are necessary or unnecessary?