For me, the two most important principles in programming are, in order, DRY and YAGNI. Most of my coding decisions ends up respecting one or the other. For some reason YAGNI seems to be less well known. In my experience one tends to get less pushback for DRY – it’s the accepted best practice. But YAGNI seems to need more persuasion, and I’m not entirely sure why.
I’m converted: I love red diffs. I don’t even look at the red sections during code review. Do the tests still pass? Ship it! The thing is that, despite me being a programmer and my “one job” (not really, but you know what I mean) being to write code, I hate code and want the least of it in my project. I mean it.
Code that doesn’t exist is excellent. It doesn’t have to be read, and therefore doesn’t need to be understood, which means it can’t confuse anyone. It doesn’t have bugs. It doesn’t need to be tested. What’s not to like?
And yet, in project after project, one sees code commented out for mostly no good reason. My personal “favourite” (by which I mean I froth at the mouth) is C or C++ code with #if 0 / #endif pairs. In one project there were even multiple of those, and nested to boot.
Maybe it has to do with not trusting version control. If all you’ve ever used is one of those ancient paid-for systems (not naming any names but you can guess) and have never felt the bliss that is working with git or Mercurial then maybe it’s understandable. Because it might actually be hard to go look at the history and find when you deleted something or why. But these days? No excuse: git grep that_thing_that_I_remember_that_isn’t here_anymore.
And never mind that, in my experience at least, the times anybody goes code spelunking for deleted code are so few and far between that the trade-off is obvious. Code that hasn’t but should be deleted gets in the way. That’s a real cost, paid every day, and for… what? Because someone someday might need that snippet and it takes them an extra minute to find it?
YAGNI. Delete and move on.
Átila on Code 