> Eventually it clicked for me: developers don’t intend to write useless code, and code that does not match the developer’s intent is by definition a bug. Therefore, any useless code you can detect is a bug.
I'm not completely sure I would take it all the way to calling it a bug, but I do appreciate a rigorous way to simplify code, because the worst case is that you've made it easier to reason about and that's a win all by itself.
(EDIT: This post also makes me feel better about my personal coding style being paranoid and doing things like using parens to force order of operations and avoiding "advanced" constructs like ?? because I don't trust myself to not shoot myself in the foot. I'm not a professional dev, so I'm happy to write verbose, inelegant code in exchange for it being so simple that I'm less likely to screw it up)
I'm not completely sure I would take it all the way to calling it a bug, but I do appreciate a rigorous way to simplify code, because the worst case is that you've made it easier to reason about and that's a win all by itself.
(EDIT: This post also makes me feel better about my personal coding style being paranoid and doing things like using parens to force order of operations and avoiding "advanced" constructs like ?? because I don't trust myself to not shoot myself in the foot. I'm not a professional dev, so I'm happy to write verbose, inelegant code in exchange for it being so simple that I'm less likely to screw it up)