[mindcrime]

It’s almost as if these rules are mostly arbitrary and don’t really matter.

Definitely. I mean, some of them probably have some objective basis. But clearly some of them are indeed subjective and arbitrary. Take "long method names" for example... I believe method names should state what they do, and should be however long it takes to do that. To my way of thinking, making a method name shorter just for the sake of being shorter, and eliding semantic information, is an anti-pattern, not a best-practice. shrug

[sbov]

Reminds me of other comments on this subject: one person's best practice is another person's bad practice.