| Essay 5 | Throw Away Your Old Code |
Recently, one of my colleagues, Mustafa, mentioned that I was “doing it again.” I was code hoarding: commenting out code that I wasn’t really planning on ever using again. I just didn’t have the heart to delete it right then, even though we version control all of our source code (and you absolutely should be doing the same). Since I could always get that old code back anyway, there was no reason to be commenting out code when I could just delete it.
Code hoarding is one of many habits that seems right on the surface. It’s a carryover from other staple engineering principles that aren’t really relevant to programming. If we were building a car, we would probably save all our scrap metal because we could reuse ...
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