Decline and fall of programming idealism.
The more code I see the more I become convinced that the best programming style is not the one that has perfect design, is absolutely robust, error-free, defensive, performant or you name it.
A good style carefully utilizes the most common practices and techniques and produces code that doesn’t hide its flaws and is easy to read to anyone reasonably literate in the language.
Whenever you try a cool idea that you’ve read about in that book published in 1996 in 5000 copies, or discover a new pattern or technique in the latest issue of a C/C++ magazine, beware: the next person looking at the code will get a strong itch to rewrite the whole thing in familiar concepts.
The cause of this miserable situation could well be that an average software development company spends approximately $0/year on developers’ education and everything a developer knows comes from the books he himself had chosen and read in his free time.
We’re lucky enough that high-level design is independent of the programming language and low-level techniques.