I'd categorize not being able to convert "unused thing" errors into warnings during development iterations as one of "The Bad".
Just today I had a couple blocks of code which were causing erratic issues. Wanted to see if it was the second one, so I quickly commented it out. This is just an exploratory development session, no need to comply with code quality guidelines. Still, the code failed to compile because now I had to worry about 8 lines with stuff that had become unused. The stubbornness about not adding an escape hatch for, again, exploratory intermediate development iterations is unnerving.
"But code should not leave unused stuff around". I agree. That's why after a hundred iterations, in the final compilation phase for production, this kind of errors-are-warnings flag would be disabled.
Just today I had a couple blocks of code which were causing erratic issues. Wanted to see if it was the second one, so I quickly commented it out. This is just an exploratory development session, no need to comply with code quality guidelines. Still, the code failed to compile because now I had to worry about 8 lines with stuff that had become unused. The stubbornness about not adding an escape hatch for, again, exploratory intermediate development iterations is unnerving.
"But code should not leave unused stuff around". I agree. That's why after a hundred iterations, in the final compilation phase for production, this kind of errors-are-warnings flag would be disabled.