This content originally appeared on Level Up Coding - Medium and was authored by Maximiliano Contieri
Code Smell 151 — Commented Code
Beginners are afraid to remove code. And many seniors too.
TL;DR: Don’t leave commented code. Remove it.
Problems
- Readability
- Dead Code
- Lack of Coverage
- Lack of Source Version Control
Solutions
- Remove commented code
- Implement Source Version Control
Context
When debugging code we tend to comment on code to see what happens.
As a final step, after all our tests pass, we must remove them following clean code practices.
Sample Code
Wrong
function arabicToRoman(num) {
var decimal = [1000, 900, 500, 400, 100, 90, 50, 40, 10, 9, 5, 4, 1];
var roman = ['M', 'CM', 'D', 'CD', 'C', 'XC', 'L', 'XL', 'X', 'IX', 'V', 'IV', 'I'];
var result = ''; for(var i = 0; i < decimal.length; i++) {
// print(i)
while(num >= decimal[i]) {
result += roman[i];
num -= decimal[i];
}
}
// if (result > 0 return ' ' += result)return result;
}
Right
function arabicToRoman(arabicNumber) {
var decimal = [1000, 900, 500, 400, 100, 90, 50, 40, 10, 9, 5, 4, 1];
var roman = ['M', 'CM', 'D', 'CD', 'C', 'XC', 'L', 'XL', 'X', 'IX', 'V', 'IV', 'I'];
var romanString = ''; for(var i = 0; i < decimal.length; i++) {
while(arabicNumber >= decimal[i]) {
romanString += roman[i];
num -= decimal[i];
}
}return romanString;
}
Detection
[X] Semi-Automatic
Some machine learning analyzers can detect or parse comments and guide as to remove them.
Tags
- Comments
Conclusion
We need to remove all commented-out code.
Relations
Refactorings
Refactoring 005 — Replace Comment with Function Name
Credits
Photo by maxim bober on Unsplash
Don’t document the problem, fix it.
Atli Björgvin Oddsson
Software Engineering Great Quotes
This article is part of the CodeSmell Series.
How to Find the Stinky parts of your Code
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Code Smell 151 — Commented Code was originally published in Level Up Coding on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
This content originally appeared on Level Up Coding - Medium and was authored by Maximiliano Contieri
Maximiliano Contieri | Sciencx (2022-07-24T23:49:20+00:00) Code Smell 151 — Commented Code. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2022/07/24/code-smell-151-commented-code/
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