a little madness

As programmers we tend to get attached to code we have written. After all, we spent all that effort dreaming it up, typing it in, and (sometimes) making it work. Many of us also like to look over how much we have churned out, to see that lines of code metric crack the 500,000 (or whatever) mark. These sorts of things make us loathe to delete code we have written. But we forget these important points:

1. Maintenance: someone has to maintain all of that code, and I’m sorry, but it’s you! The less code you have to maintain, the better. So next time you try and crack the million LOC, think about how fun it is going to be to maintain it all :).
2. Dead code rots: leaving unused code around “just in case” is a particularly bad idea. If it isn’t exercised, it will become broken very soon. Its very presence distracts the reader from their real task.
3. Source control: think you might need that dead code again? Think that a bad refactor may bring you unstuck? That’s what source control is for: it has got your back.
4. Efficiency: every little bit of code slows everything down just that little bit. More disk space. Longer compile times. Slower IDE performance. Larger reports. Over time, all these little things add up.
5. Elegance: verbose code is often a sign of a non-optimal solution. When refactoring, you should be able to use your superior knowledge of the problem to simplify. Cutting back code in this way removes the cruft that builds up over time.

So, stop being so happy that you’ve produced so much code. You should be much happier to achieve the same result with a smaller codebase, even if it means throwing away yesterday’s hard work!

This entry was posted on Friday, February 2nd, 2007 at 12:49 am and is filed under Agile, Opinion, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.