>Anyways, and to the risk of being called unprofessional by Al, I would say that, to my taste (which is, like any other's imperfect), you were not following best practices either in that small piece of code, as it was a function (or method) that was performing two distinctive tasks; so maybe a better solution would have been to separate the searching of the files (which can then be used for other purposes) with the actual testing of the files (and this should be done in two methods, one that checks an individual table and then one that checks a collection of tables, the output of the method that finds the files in the first place)

Just thinking... why do we need best practices? Probably because we don't have standards. And can't have them.

Engineers in the old branches have them - construction, mechanics, electrics, even electronics. They know exactly which size of a screw is the minimum for each case, how to calculate the load and what properties the piece carrying that load has to have.

Which is exactly what I can't see us having. The field is too diverse. We have coding and runtime environments by truckloads, and what may be a must in one may be a serious showstopper in another. A minor detail to illustrate this - the tag on deleted() and its history. It was first needed, then just recommended for speed, then frowned upon for speed and network load, then recommended again. Or the use of color - remember how gray was the world between W3.0 and XP? Or the manual locking of records, which was a must before we had transactions, and is now rather unreliable, due to the SMB2 conspiracy glitch.

Or, to venture outside of our yard, look at jslint.com, the javascript checker site. Just look at all the checkboxes - my bet is that each option there divides the populus into proponents and opponents of it, so even allowing for some grouping in there, there must be hundreds of schools (or plagues, prides, swarms or just plain herds) of thought. Just go ask them collectively what are best practices and start counting the dead and wounded.