Ii doesn't take courage. Just a little experience tells you that code you delete is less code to maintain. And if you want to build anything non-trivial, maintainability is absolutely critical.
I love deleting code.
I love deleting code.
A good example of this is Google Docs. In the first version of Docs, it was possible to change CSS style sheets and make changes to the low-level document. You could change background colors and so on.
In the rewrite they removed this functionality to achieve "more simplicity". However, many people were relying on the customizability, so they have a ton of complaints about the new version.
It appears that the current decision is to keep the old version "forever". Of course, whether this is true remains to be seen. But the lesson is that even if you think a certain feature is useless, people might be relying on it. You're never sure how customers are actually using your program.
So if you "boldly" delete something you might end up maintaining more versions, have to reinstate the deleted code, or lose customers. I think that's where the courage comes in.
What is argued is, the active current code should be readable. Version control systems, handle older versions of code very well.
Read my post again, would testing have helped Google in this case?
I dont think this is what the post is concerned about. It is about the dead code, developers leave as commented (for some reason), instead of actually deleting it.