17. There Are No Dogmas

TDD fans will tell you that it is absolutely necessary to write tests before the code.

Enthusiastic OOP practitioners will trash any code that does not follow the principles, approaches and philosophy of their favorite paradigm.

Advocates of functional programming will argue that only the functional approach makes sense, anything else should be at least embarrassing.

Programmers have created a huge number of rules that they consider absolute: we need some certainty about what is good and what is bad when writing code.

In reality, these rules are nothing more than a set of opinions about how you can and should write code. The code should work, ideally quickly, and preferably in a way that is easy to modify and extend in the future. All other "dogmas" are not dogmas. They may or may not be applicable for any particular project or program.