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I hate protothreads with a passion.

Not because of what they do (it's a neat trick), but because it teaches bad development practices to programmers.

I had a junior programmer "correct" me on some embedded code saying that all my local variables should actually be declared static, because in their experience "static is the way to go".

This "embedded" system was actually running Linux, using proper threading semantics.

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That's a matter of using the right tool for the environment, though, isn't it? Someone looking at the world from the small-system, bare-metal embedded development perspective might express similar feelings about garbage collection, for teaching junior programmers to be unacceptably sloppy about memory management.

I think it is simply to be expected that junior programmers will frequently pick the wrong tool for the job, for any job in any context, as they have not yet had time to master many tools and do not yet have enough experience to understand the edges of their ignorance. (Presumably we would start thinking of them as peers and calling them "senior programmers" at some point along this journey of growth...)

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