programming practices: never say never

Jan Bannister wrote this post: bool considered harmful, and writes:

Never Use Bool, or more specifically never user bool as a parameter. It is the most foolish of datatypes and conveys the smallest amount of information possible.

I can disagree with that in a number of ways, but the culprit was the "never use bool as a parameter", the biggest problems I see
- you would end up with hundreds of enums to replace your bool parameters, and then
- where do you put all those enums?
- at some point you would probably duplicate some of the required functionality

so, what do we do, bool is still "harmful", but not always, that's the key, I can think of at least 2 situations where you don't necessarily need to replace your bools with enums
- private methods: they are (hopefully) only used in that class... and the method is not that big, and the class is not that big, and you added comments for the method/parameters... sigh...
- functions with a single parameter that is just an on/off thing, e.g. SetVisible(true)

there, now it doesn't sound that bad, bottom line, never say never, don't abuse any technique