What's your most controversial programming opinion?

Question

Programmers who don't code in their spare time for fun will never become as good as those that do.

I think even the smartest and most talented people will never become truly good programmers unless they treat it as more than a job. Meaning that they do little projects on the side, or just mess with lots of different languages and ideas in their spare time.

(Note: I'm not saying good programmers do nothing else than programming, but they do more than program from 9 to 5)

The only "best practice" you should be using all the time is "Use Your Brain".

Too many people jumping on too many bandwagons and trying to force methods, patterns, frameworks etc onto things that don't warrant them. Just because something is new, or because someone respected has an opinion, doesn't mean it fits all :)

EDIT: Just to clarify - I don't think people should ignore best practices, valued opinions etc. Just that people shouldn't just blindly jump on something without thinking about WHY this "thing" is so great, IS it applicable to what I'm doing, and WHAT benefits/drawbacks does it bring?

"Googling it" is okay!

Yes, I know it offends some people out there that their years of intense memorization and/or glorious stacks of programming books are starting to fall by the wayside to a resource that anyone can access within seconds, but you shouldn't hold that against people that use it.

Too often I hear googling answers to problems the result of criticism, and it really is without sense. First of all, it must be conceded that everyone needs materials to reference. You don't know everything and you will need to look things up. Conceding that, does it really matter where you got the information? Does it matter if you looked it up in a book, looked it up on Google, or heard it from a talking frog that you hallucinated? No. A right answer is a right answer.

What is important is that you understand the material, use it as the means to an end of a successful programming solution, and the client/your employer is happy with the results.

(although if you are getting answers from hallucinatory talking frogs, you should probably get some help all the same)

Most comments in code are in fact a pernicious form of code duplication.

We spend most of our time maintaining code written by others (or ourselves) and poor, incorrect, outdated, misleading comments must be near the top of the list of most annoying artifacts in code.

I think eventually many people just blank them out, especially those flowerbox monstrosities.

Much better to concentrate on making the code readable, refactoring as necessary, and minimising idioms and quirkiness.

On the other hand, many courses teach that comments are very nearly more important than the code itself, leading to the this next line adds one to invoiceTotal style of commenting.