Hacker News Reader

I came to detest assert when I was working on a project with another guy, who used it generously, as a substitute for assertions in (non existing) unit tests. Nothing would annoy me more than working on my code, running it, and having all sorts of weird assertions pop up all over the place from this guy's code.

The biggest problem I've seen with assert[1] is putting functioning code inside one and then not knowing why your code no longer works with NDEBUG.

[1] http://en.cppreference.com/w/c/error/assert

Those are panic territory, which carries a different connotation than the word assert (which has very likely influenced in its very widespread misuse).