[JMostert]

Funny that he has this under "Signs that you shouldn't be a programmer": "you think the presence of code in a program will affect its runtime behavior, even if it is never invoked".

Anyone who has written code in C can probably cite an anecdote where exactly this was the case, be it from a compiler bug or as fallout from a memory corruption bug.

Maybe we should add "does not understand the von Neumann architecture" to the list of signs that you're a mediocre programmer... On second thought, let's not -- the piece is bad enough to begin with. The "alternative careers" sections are just odious, and the whole thing breathes an air of inconstructiveness.

[ewjordan]

This happens in JVM languages as well. Most optimizing compilers will do things differently depending on what happens elsewhere in a function, even if it's "dead code" (and especially if it's dead code that the compiler is too stupid to realize is dead).

Granted this usually only affects runtime speed, but in some circumstances things can get worse (multithreaded programs are particularly susceptible to such optimizations, especially if they're not written correctly - yes, the real problem may be that you've written your code wrong, but there are very real situations where the presence of dead code can change the optimization path taken enough so that it either works or doesn't, which is a very real effect).

And that's even before we take into account compiler bugs, which just make things worse.