The pattern can be observed very well and is dominant present in contemporary social networks and specific in open source development groups. The metaphor of the anti-principle is simple: don't ask a horsing company about bees.

Cobol works with Files, Records, Fields (or Items) and values can be attached to named conditions, initial states of variables. But modern languages know of (additional) Attributes and Properties.

Mixing the usage of these concepts is a pain. Not only in these modern languages.

In it’s first conception Cobol featured the ALTER statement. It was a naive and unfortunate try to conceptualize what we nowadays know as a switch or case construct. It followed the habitude of programming to insert a variable jump in the program code. A sorting algorithm is the kind of program that would benefit from this weird construct. Also, synchronizing updates (a mutation file) against a Master Data File would gain performance when equipped with the ALTER statements in the proper places. And the test and debug sessions became a nightmare.