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What Are the Unwritten Rules of Deleting Code?

Posted by samzenpus on from the best-practices dept.

Press2ToContinue writes "I came across this page that asks the question, 'what are the unwritten rules of deleting code?' It made me realize that I have seen no references to generally-accepted best-practice documents regarding code modification, deletion, or rewrites. I would imagine Slashdot's have come across them if they exist. The answers may be somewhat language-dependent, but what best practices do Slashdot's use when they modify production code?"

3 of 384 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How can ... by ChunderDownunder · · Score: 5, Informative

    version control.

  2. Re:The more..... by rwven · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yeah, I have no qualms about deleting code. There are others I've seen who just comment out massive blocks of code and leave them there....for me to eventually find and delete myself, apparently. Version control is there for a purpose. If you need something back...it's there.

  3. Re:Vigil by rwaldin · · Score: 5, Informative

    Ah, Vigil! What a wonderfully amusing language...

    https://github.com/munificent/vigil

    But isn't a language that deletes code crazy?

    No, wanting to keep code that demonstrably has bugs according to its own specifications is crazy. What good could it possibly serve? It is corrupted and must be cleansed from your codebase.

    Vigil will do this for you automatically.

    Vigil deleted a function. Won't that cause the functions that call it to fail?

    It would seem that those functions appear to be corrupted as well. Run Vigil again and it will take care of that for you. Several invocations may be required to fully excise all bugs from your code.