There was a recent thread on HN about generating HTML using string templates, arguing that if users keep on doing something for years despite constant recommendations against it, the recommendations must be wrong.

I didn't agree with it - it's an ok rule of thumb in moderation but I don't think HTML string templates are a good example. But, `cat` is absolutely the perfect example.

I use shellcheck which automatically corrects all my "useless" uses of cat, and I can tell you there's no more common error in other people's code that it complains about. And the benefits of "fixing" this error are always so marginal, the resultant code so much less readable.