He ignores a lot of examples where best practices have simply become common knowledge, and you'd never consider doing it any other way. For example, structured programming - most languages don't even provide a way to jump into the middle of a code block now. Avoiding self-modifying code, unless you live in Ruby-land. Lexical scoping, which is widely considered the only sane default among language designers today, though we're still waiting for mainstream languages to catch up. Multi-character variable names that don't have to start with one particular letter (Fortran, I'm looking at you). Automatic documentation generators - thank you JavaDoc. Garbage collection. Having classes manage their own memory in languages that don't provide garbage collection.
Today's "best practice" may be tomorrow's fad - or it may be tomorrow's common knowledge. The differentiating factor is usually the ratio of actual experience to wild-eyed exuberance that its proponents have. So I'm betting that Rails is just a fad, but several of the XP practices like unit testing and standup meetings will have lasting impact.
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He ignores a lot of examples where best practices have simply become common knowledge, and you'd never consider doing it any other way. For example, structured programming - most languages don't even provide a way to jump into the middle of a code block now. Avoiding self-modifying code, unless you live in Ruby-land. Lexical scoping, which is widely considered the only sane default among language designers today, though we're still waiting for mainstream languages to catch up. Multi-character variable names that don't have to start with one particular letter (Fortran, I'm looking at you). Automatic documentation generators - thank you JavaDoc. Garbage collection. Having classes manage their own memory in languages that don't provide garbage collection.
Today's "best practice" may be tomorrow's fad - or it may be tomorrow's common knowledge. The differentiating factor is usually the ratio of actual experience to wild-eyed exuberance that its proponents have. So I'm betting that Rails is just a fad, but several of the XP practices like unit testing and standup meetings will have lasting impact.