I don't feel the need to give dangerous advice. As an educator that has to do with the stuff people build more or less unsupervised I can assure you that dangerous is the defacto default starting point for anybody who has no idea what they are doing.

There is only a very specific class of person, who is often overcautious and perfectionist to a degree that they won't even get started. They might need some advice that eases their worries. But the dangers are real. Overcomplexity is also a danger.

Most of the "dangerous advice" I have encountered as an engineer (be it electrical or software) I have seen in the form of legacy projects without anybody there to explain them to me. There you can see where corners where cut, where they were completely out of their depth, etc.

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brabel a day ago | parent | next [-]

I feel like there’s a cultural difference between people in this thread. I’ve lived and worked in 3 different countries and I can say that in one , you absolutely don’t need to tell anyone that it’s ok to break rules sometimes. They’ll do that without your advice, you can be sure of that! In others, only a small percentage of people will, specially when they are inexperienced and fear the consequences more than would be warranted in reality. Perhaps that’s the biggest culture difference I’ve noticed.

	▲	atoav a day ago \| parent [-]
		Sure, FYI I am teaching Germany. Not exactly known to be a country of rule breakers, in fact more like the opposite. But rules that you don't know are easy to break. E.g. beginners with electrical wiring may or may not know what is up to code and what isn't and thus violate said code without knowing it. To know when certain rules can be bent or broken usually requires a deep understanding for why the rules exist and what they are meant to prevent. Beginners do not have that knowledge and thus I'd hessitate to give any general advice to skip rules to them, unless it is extremely specific and tied to one specific situation. Usually the more useful advice to beginners is when to ignore conventions and how everybody is doing it and when to just use the boring stuff.

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mbb70 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

The key is goodness/badness of advice is a function of the receiver. The internet doesn't give you control over who reads your stuff, so internet advice is safer and less useful than it could be.

The advice "use 'any' if it's too much work to type" is dangerous/bad advice for some developers because they don't have a well tuned definition of 'too much work', and they might not have all the tricks in the toolbox for every situation.

But legacy code or poorly typed libs can be an infinity time suck, and the most pragmatic approach might be to cut your losses, slap an 'any' on it and move on.

A great mentor gives the best (different axis than good/bad or safe/danger) advice for an individual in a specific situation.