342
ripbit
7y

Never delete code immediately. Always comment it out first.

Comments
  • 66
    Or use source control.
  • 2
    Like I always do :)
  • 8
    @filthyranter I sometimes commit commented code if its code to be, where the dependencies are not in place.

    Writing a stub, commenting it out and adding a todo line so it shows up in the todo list is a good way to quickly finish up once all else is done.
  • 6
    @Olverine @filthyranter Of course. I should've made it clear.

    I was carefully doing the Ctrl-Z Ctrl-Y surgery to get back the code I deleted prematurely. The dev saw me doing this a couple of times and decided to drop those words of wisdom that would guide me to this day.
  • 4
    Soft delete - staying in legacy until the end of times :D
  • 5
    Why oh why?

    Use local history of your IDE. Use version control. Never let commented code stick around.

    I consider this an anti-pattern.
  • 8
    This is exactly why our codebase is littered with commented out code.

    My colleagues adhere to your advice, but then always forget to delete it before committing...
  • 7
    On the plus side, technically, our codebase has lots of comments 😜
  • 2
    You fucked up rollback this file to orogin Head on git :P
  • 4
    Never delete C code. comment it out, but prefix it with a newline trigraph so that it looks like a comment but still executes.
  • 0
    No worries when using Android Studio since it has local history. Xcode sucks it doesn't have that feat πŸ˜‘
  • 1
    I learned that the hard way in my very initial days of programming.
  • 0
    When I'm about to rewrite some code, I always comment out the old code first, sometime i can reuse some of the old code.
  • 1
    Make sure you don't commit commented out code, one of our projects is full of commented out code and nobody dares to remove them (because they *might* be "important")
  • 0
    Words to live by.
  • 0
    @filthyranter and thats where source controll like git is the way to go.

    Especially since commented code might not light up as removed in a diff, at least not at clear.

    So every “rule” has its exception :)
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