>To encourage people to pay more attention to the official language rules, to detect legal but suspicious constructions, and to help find interface mismatches undetectable with simple mechanisms for separate compilation, Steve Johnson adapted his pcc compiler to produce lint [Johnson 79b], which scanned a set of files and remarked on dubious constructions.
-- https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html
Unfortunately since 1979, majority of C devs think they know better.