I'm learning to play the drums, and I got
a good DVD from Amazon. It starts off with a rant about drum technique.
The instructor mentions the old rule of thumb that you're best to avoid conversations about religion and politics, and says that he thinks drum technique should be added to the list. He says that during the DVD, he'll tell you that certain moves are the wrong moves to make, but that any time he says that, it really means that the given move is the wrong move to make
in the context of the technique he's teaching.
He then goes on to give credit to drummers who play using techniques that are different from his, and to say that it's your job as a drummer to take every technique with a grain of salt and disavow the whole idea of regarding any particular move as wrong. Yet it's also your job as a student of any particular technique to interpret that technique strictly and exactly, if you want to learn it well enough to use it. So when you're a drummer, the word "wrong" should be meaningless, yet when you're a student, it should be very important.
Programming has this tension also. If you're a good programmer, you have to be capable of understanding both One True Way fanatacism and "right tool for the job" indifference. And you have to be able to use any particular right tool for a job in that particular's tool One True Way (or choose wisely between the options that it offers you).