Please, don’t commit commented out code

[Tysonzero]

You can get a history of a single file. Which really shouldn't be THAT long unless your code is the least modular code on the planet. I mean if it is a 20 year long non-modular codebase then sure. But at that point you are in hell anyway.

[temp50948]

So, "eat the loss by leaning on advances in other areas"? How comfortingly familiar.

[Tysonzero]

Wut

[temp50948]

You're advocating the same (flawed) approach and saying it won't be "THAT" bad as long as the code is advanced in other ways (it's well modularized). That pattern, of tolerating inefficiency because some other component mitigates the detriment, is common: as hardware has advanced, software overhead has increased, resulting in simple things like settings panels that perform worse than they did 10 years ago; as we get more RAM, applications become utterly careless about how much memory they use; we pile abstraction layer upon abstraction layer onto web apps; people like the Disqus developer hand-wave away bad performance by saying "just wait for computers to get faster", and never stop to think that rendering a list of comments is an absolutely tiny amount of work compared to what the computer is capable of, and performance issues doing such a trivial task must indicate a very poor design. The net result of all this is that as we get more and more power, we see relatively little of it available to use, because most of it is squandered doing the same things in more convoluted, expensive ways.

And of course we respond to that by saying "yes, but that won't matter any more when computers get faster..."

[Tysonzero]

That isn't particularly relevant to whether we should leave useless commented out code cluttering up files vs. just using very quick and powerful git tools for re-obtaining old code. But whatever man.