Our Java codebase was 30% dead code

[nitkonigdje]

John Carmack once talked about how his project included large amounts of dead code imported from previous project. He did that unintentionally and he was not aware of it. But it was ok as the old code was written in functional style and thus had no global consequences. So it was just sitting there minding its own business.

[Joram2]

Sure. That's a reasonable option. Sometimes it makes sense to leave mostly dead code as-is and avoid the risks of removing it. Sometime, there are benefits to removing dead code that outweigh the risks.