I know the adjective "cowboy" was used for some programmers in the early 1970's. BASIC, a dynamically typed language, was wildly popular for microcomputers in the 1980's. There were schema-free databases for IBM mainframes in the 70's too. For that matter, LISP was a dynamically typed language back in 1958.
Although "scrum", "extreme programming", "ruby" and things like that are new, all of the real fighting points in software engineering practice have been battlegrounds since the 1970's if not sooner.
As someone who did his first contract gig in 1987, I can say that all of those rules are conditional -- I can pound out certain kinds of projects quickly with languages like PHP and there are other ones where only C++ will do. Premature optimization is a mistake, but its also a mistake to build a system on an architecture that is doomed to forever be slow, unscalable and (worst of all) high latency.