Best practices – where do they really come from?
When we are talking about “best practices," we can differentiate three cases, as follows:
- Principles that have been proven for decades to work, which also are deduced from common sense: In this category, we can—for example—find design patterns. In short and if you do not know them, these are tools that fix recurrent programming problems. They have been here for decades and are known by millions of developers.
- Choices made because we had to make them: Here, we can find things such as code style, naming conventions, and so on. Technically, it does not matter if you would like to use camelCase or snake_case to name your files. But if everyone is following the same rule, it is easier for everybody to understand each other.
- “Technical” best practices: Some “best practices” are actually dictated by technical constraints and features. A concrete example is “...
