is "NOT EXISTS" bad SQL practice?

In SQL Server, using "NOT EXISTS" in queries are considered bad practice and I've heard that micr开发者_JAVA百科osoft code reviews test for NOT EXISTS and flag these as warnings. Why is NOT EXISTS considered bad practice and that join operators are preferred over NOT EXISTS?

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Given that:

• Any reasonably query optimizer will be able to convert between “not exists”, “exists” and "joins", so there is normally no performance difference these days.

• “Not exists” can often be easier to read then joins.

Therefore I don’t consider “Not exists” to be bad practice in the general case.