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A developer who needs courage to delete code is probably doing things wrong in the first place. With source control and good testing, you should be able to delete code without fear.

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I agree whole heartedly. When you commit you're free to do drastic restructuring, leading to better thought out code. In the worst case you can revert to an earlier stable point but I find that's almost never needed.

This is also a situation where code reviews would help. Unnecessary/redundant comments are badly considered forms of communication between coders. When someone is going to review your code critically it forces you to be clear and concise, otherwise they'll call you out on it.

I'm talking about the devs that do use VCS and yet they still use the comments to keep track of changes. You can tell who they are by looking at their commit messages. "Commit for 24-Mar-2011" is a dead giveaway. :-)

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