Here are some mentally defective things that programmers actually say:

1. Compilers produce assembly that runs faster than hand coded assembly. (are you serious?)
2. Amdahl's law. (like Aristotle, simultaneously trivial and wrong)
3. Goto considered harmful. (Dyjkstra's political crap, no goto no languege, pref. computed goto)
4. Code should not self-modify or use complicated spaghetti jump tables.

All of these positions come from the following mother-lie:

• The measure of a program's quality is how well a human can read and maintain it.

The measure of a program's quality is how short it is. People should not be maintaining code, their code should be small enough to write from scratch or autogenerate from a small description (like lex/yacc).

Other stupid political lies: "multiple inheritence is bad", "mousing is faster than texting", "recursion is better than procedural", and "corporations can produce quality software".