In his latest post Anthony Ferarra makes a suggestion about teaching developers how to solve problems via a "quick fix" versus educating them about the real problem: educate, don't mediate.
Recently, there has been a spout of attention about how to deal with eval(base64_decode("blah")); style attacks. A number of posts about "The Dreaded eval(base64_decode()) - And how to protect your site and visitors" have appeared lately. They have been suggesting how to mitigate the attacks. This is downright bad. The problem is that these posts have been suggesting things like "Disable eval()" and "Disable base64_decode()" as possible solutions. And while technically that would work, it completely misses the point, and does nothing to protect users
He suggests that developers shouldn't just look for a "quick fix" solution posted in a tutorial somewhere and go on their merry way. One danger in this is that those instructions could only be patching part of the problem, not all of it. In this case, the disable eval/base64 handling is only a code-level fix. If this exploit exists in your application, the attacker was able to get to the local file system - a much bigger problem.
Link: http://blog.ircmaxell.com/2014/10/educate-dont-mediate.html
