Comment by stockresearcher 3 days ago
> the best analogy I've ever heard.
It’s an analogy that gets the job done and is targeted at non-tech managers.
It’s not perfect. Dead code has no “weight” unless you’re in a heavily storage-constrained environment. But 10,000 unnecessary rivets has an effect on the airplane everywhere, all the time.
Yes, we all love pedantry around here (that’s probably 99% of the reason I wrote the original comment!)
But if your position is that the percentage of time in the software lifecycle that dead code has a negative effect on a system is anywhere close to the percentage of time in an aircraft lifecycle that extra non-functional rivets (or other unnecessary weight objects) has a negative effect on the aircraft, you’re just wrong.
In this analogy, I'd say dead code corresponds to airplane parts that aren't actually installed on the aircraft. When people talk about the folly of measuring productivity in lines of code, they aren't referring to the uselessness of dead code, they're referring to the harms that come from live code that's way bigger than it needs to be.
When you are thinking of development and refactoring, dead code absolutely has weight.
> Dead code has no “weight”
Assuming it is truly dead and not executable (which someone would have to verify is & remains the case), dead code exerts a pressure on every human engineer who has to read (around) it, determine that it is still dead, etc. It also creates risk that it will be inadvertently activated and create e.g. security exposure.