commented-out-code.md

Commented-out Code

What It Looks Like

# users.each do |u|
#   puts u.inspect
# end

Why It Hurts

Commenting out code is a risky way of keeping temporarily-unused functionality around. Since you can't test it, how do you know it will still work when you uncomment it?

How To Fix It

In my experience, commented-out code rarely comes back to life, so the best thing to do is delete it. If the code is truly useful, e.g. as development instrumentation, it should be tested, factored out... and then disabled in production with a feature flag or dependency injection.

Caveats

TODO