Deleting code
December 8th, 2011 | Published in Uncategorized
It may seem paradoxical, but even though a programmer’s job is to write code one of the most productive things he or she can do is remove code. Software AG changed the way a particular module works, so I’m having to change a system routine to fix a resulting error.* This routine was originally written by Bill Wagner in the mid 1980’s and I’ve been maintaining it for close to a quarter century, and as I was looking at it I realized that the reasons for a lot of the things it’s doing disappeared years ago. When I get done it should be significantly shorter than what it is now.
This reminded me of a story about early Macintosh development: -2000 Lines of Code. It’s a great story, and a great site.
* Technical details: ADALNKR, the reentrant module for calling Adabas at the Assembler level, now dynamically allocates working storage. If you call it repeatedly, it will leak memory, and our installation’s IEFUJV, the job verification exit that runs in the JES2 address space, does this. (This is what caused our emergency IPL on November 4.) Last week they finally sent us documentation for how to ask for this memory to be released.