Becoming a Better Programmer

Chapter 4. Improve Code by Removing It

We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end...

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Less is more. It’s a trite maxim, but sometimes it really is true.

Some of the most exciting improvements I remember making to code involved removing vast chunks of it. Let me tell you, it’s a good feeling.

War Story: No Need for the Code

As an Agile software development team, we’d been following the hallowed eXtreme Programming tenets, including YAGNI. That is, You Aren’t Gonna Need It: a caution to not write unnecessary code—even code you think is going to be needed in future versions. Don’t write it now if you don’t need it now. Wait until you do have a genuine need.

This sounds like eminently sensible advice. And we’d all bought in to it.

But human nature being what it is, we fell short in a few places. At one point, I observed that the product was taking too long to execute certain tasks—simple tasks that should have been near instantaneous. This was because they had been over-implemented, festooned with extra bells and whistles that were not required, and littered with hooks for later extension. None of these things were being used, but at the time they each had seemed sensible additions.

So I simplified the code, improved the product performance, and reduced the level of global code entropy by simply removing all of the offending “features” from the codebase. Helpfully, my unit tests told me that I hadn’t ...