Just ran across this and was marveling at how aptly the idiom is named. People have already put this on a tshirt.

Learnings and affirmations from this episode:

• Clang does have -Wunreachable-code to warn about this, but it’s not in -Wall. (One of these days I need to learn all -Wflag I should be keeping on when compiling my software. I always thought that -Wall was enough.)
• Open source is good. Amen!.
• Test. Test. Test. As Auerbach concludes:

The people who wrote it knew what they were doing. The bug is indeed the result
of negligence, but the sad and scary thing is that, for software developers,
this is not a 'What were they thinking?' moment. It’s an 'Oh my God, that could
have been me' moment.