All accounts "fall neatly" into the broad categories, though. There are sub-categories for accounts with contrary normal balances for a given type of a given account category but they still summarize into their parent category.

A contra-equity account (like "Owner draws") has a normal debit balance. That's contrary to the normal credit balance of an equity account. It still summarizes to equity and results in the owner's draws being debited from the owner's equity debit balance.

When I hear programmers talking about debits / credits like they're positive or negative I get a feeling that they're trying to re-invent a really simple "wheel" that they don't want to understand. It reminds me of wild gyrations programmers go thru w/ ORM's to avoid just learning some SQL.