A few years back I was maintaining software in C and added a bunch of declarations to the function definitions to enable GCC to detect and warn on format string errors. The other programmer got angry and promptly turned them all off again because they were "creating too many warnings." and making it harder to see bugs he needed to find. (he liked to refer to what I did as the "code nazi thing")
Fast forward a few weeks, and we tried the software on 64 bit servers for the first time and my software works perfectly but his won't run for more than a minute without crashing. Our boss ended up having all of the servers reformatted with 32 bit Linux just to accommodate him.
A few years after that, he left the company and I inherited the code complete with an enormous bug list. First thing I did was enable every possible warning and correct the compiler's complaint (something he liked to tell me he never had time for). The result was a 90% reduction of bugs for two weeks of effort.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
