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Comment by PopeDotNinja | Hacker News Reader

I don’t disagree that purging unneeded code has value. That being said, software systems are so complex, isn’t it better to just leave code alone if it’s not negatively impacting the business? How many orgs have a micro service architecture that is so well tested that you can delete code from one service and demonstrate that won’t cause a failure in some other service? I haven’t seen one yet.

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Deleting code shouldn't be this hard, by logging how often a piece of code is being invoked in production one can start planning purges of unused dead code. It has to be done carefully but by no means it is so complex that it shouldn't be done.

Dead code is often a negative for maintenance, understanding and performance. With version control one can always go back and recover deleted code that proves to be useful later on.

Ways old, unused code can bite you in the ass:

* When new folks are onboarded, they should be spending a lot of time looking through the code base. Maybe on their own, maybe as part of other tasks, but they'll be reading this dead code multiple times.

* If the dead code is an entire method, and hasn't been used in a while, it probably doesn't work. What happens when someone calls that method now?

* Your CI/CD pipelines spend time building (and probably testing) dead code.

There’s a cost to keeping the old code around, it’s just hard to see and quantify because it’s not acute (e.g. it doesn’t cause an outage).

At some point the cost of figuring out how to remove the code will be less than the cost of keeping it around.

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