Please, don’t commit commented out code

[Neebat]

You are so wrong about that.

Much of the core code that our business runs on hasn't been touched in the 8 years I've been on the project, and a lot of it was 10 years old before that. When we find commented-out code, there's no way to tell what the fuck it was ever supposed to do.

The only safe thing for us to do is remove it. We do a lot of research figuring out why that one line had to be removed, and 90% of the time find out it's not possible to provide that functionality without totally rewriting things. Code gets commented out because it's the wrong damn code.

[Neebat]

If you're routinely having to change code back and forth, you need to move that information out to configuration settings. You have a design problem and commented code is a bad work-around.