[seanwilson]

> It will teach you bad practices, like abusing of dangerous programming constructs or data structures to optimized the code

If someone can't weigh up the pros and cons before using a particular technique, they're going to be a bad software engineer anyway. The field is all about making the right tradeoffs in particular situations, and blindly following current generalised "best" practices without really understanding what they're meant to be better than is going to get you into trouble too.

Breadth of knowledge and experience is a great thing. If you follow from the start that OOP is the right and only way to do things for example, you're not going to have a feel for when it gets in the way. Actually knowing what it's like and what happens when you do something the "bad" way is very valuable experience too e.g. you're going to be a better coder if you'd had to battle with buffer overflows and memory leaks in C in the past even if now you only use Java and Python.

This kind of logic really bugged me after moving from academia into industry. In academia for example, it's usually the right choice to make quick and dirty prototypes to get the results you need for a paper and not burn time over-engineering it. This doesn't mean I don't how to clean up code. I would also say it gives me more experience on avoiding over-engineering compared to someone that tries to copy best practices all the time.