Commented Out NPR Code

Until reading Neal Ford's 10 Ways to Improve Your Code (www.nealford.com); I hadn't consciously thought about how often NPR Report Writers encounter commented out code in NPR & $T macros.

At times programmers can feel that commenting out code and then leaving it in place is good backup. But ... it makes the MEDITECH NPR code harder to maintain:

- A find and replace in the macro will update the commented code unless you step thru each replacement. That's not fun.
- Commented out code is easy to confuse with production code.
- Backups of the macro OR/AND NPR program preserve the code in its original state.

Neal says it succinctly: "Lots of commented out code is a smell -- get rid of it." Of course he's using the term 'smell' coined by Kent Beck: http://martinfowler.com/bliki/CodeSmell.html.