I prefer coding standards to be logical. This is my argument for why the following set of standards are not.

**I need to know one of two things: (1) why I'm wrong, or (2) how to convince my team to change them**.

**camelCase: Functions, class names, methods, and variables must be camelCase.**

* Makes it hard to differentiate between variables and classes
* Goes against PHP's lowercase/underscored variables/functions and UpperCamelCase classes

Example:

```
$customerServiceBillingInstance = new customerServiceBillingInstance(); // theirs
$customer_service_billing_instance = new CustomerServiceBillingInstance();

```

**Functions/methods must always return a value (and returned values must always be stored).**

This appears on hundreds of our php pages:

```
$equipmentList = new equipmentList();
$success = $equipmentList->loadFromDatabase(true, '');
$success = $equipmentList->setCustomerList();
$success = $equipmentList->setServerList();
$success = $equipmentList->setObjectList();
$success = $equipmentList->setOwnerList();
$success = $equipmentList->setAccessList();

```

The return value is rarely used but always stored. It encourages the use of copy-and-paste.

**No static methods**

Lines like the following appear thousands of times in the codebase:

```
$equipmentList = new equipmentList();
$success = $equipmentList->loadFromDatabase();

```

I would prefer:

```
$equipmentList = equipmentList::load();

```

What reason is there to not use static methods or properties? Aren't static methods responsible for non-instance-specific logic? Like initializing or populating a new instance?

**Your code is not OOP unless everything returns an object**

There's a piece of code that performs a query, checks it several ways for errors, and then processes the resulting array. It is repeated (copied+pasted) several times, so I put it in the base class. Then I was told returning an array is not OOP.

**How do you defend these practices?** I really do need to know. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

**If you can't defend them,** how do you convince the adamant author they need to be changed?