[pockmarked19]

The first snippet of code makes me nauseous and the second makes me murderous, so the former is obviously better.

That being said, these people should all be miles away from mission critical code.

[ryandrake]

They should be miles away from production code, mission critical or otherwise. Unless they just love eating hard-to-reproduce bugs for breakfast. Do they teach mutexes and semaphores in university anymore?