Actually, it does work, because languages tend to provide ways to notify the compiler that what you're doing doesn't warrant a warning. I've worked on big C codebases, some of which I built and some of which I inherited, and I was always able to get it to the point where it would compile with -Werror -Wall -Wextra etc, many times even -pedantic, with very few (if any) pragmas. The only exception to this was compiling for MSVC, which is no surprise since they don't really care about C.

When I use an external library in my project, a part of me dies inside if I see a stream of warnings. So I understand where Pike, Thompson et al are coming from. They're just misguided in their approach.

The trouble with C is that there's no "official" compiler like modern languages have, so there's no consensus on what merits a warning or not (and the spec is so terrible that you'd have a hard time coming up with them anyway). But for modern languages, you have a clean slate to work from, which means that we have an opportunity to do it right this time.