Exactly. /begin rant I'm working on a C++ code base developed by contractors that were lazy and doing things the expedient way instead of the correct way (thou

Exactly. /begin rant I'm working on a C++ code base developed by contractors that were lazy and doing things the expedient way instead of the correct way (thousands of circular dependencies between libs - and even apps - apps depending on source from other apps), multiple copies basic functionality with slight changes (largely bug fixed in one place, but they forgot the other X places it was copied). I've gone so far as to write a "cleanup" script in python that runs a number of transformations on the source. Fixing things like inconsistent line-endings (via dos2unix), inconsistent formatting (via clang-formatting), limited conversions of certain Boost uses to std C++, a few pervasive spelling errors (contracts were eastern European, non-native English speakers). Another thing I'm considering is removing all comments. Lots of dead, commented out, code. Also, invalid UTF-8 characters in comments, from an ANSI code page I've not been able to identify (which of course creates problems with the python script treating the source as UTF-8). The comments that are currently present that I've seen are: 1. stupid/moronic/redundant (like merely marking constructors as ctor and destructors as dctor with no more info - like I can't just figure that out by reading the source to begin with) 2. Just plain wrong. As-in, comment no longer matches the code. 3. In a foreign language (Ukrainian/Russian), in an unknown code-page, so also worthless at face value (yeah, I could lookup the code pages for Ukraine and Russia have give it a shot and run the result through a translator), but it's likely the result will also fall under #2. 4. Unnecessary demarcation between functions. e.g. "// -------" out to ~80 characters wide between functions with no other white-space. Want things to be clearer? Don't use K&R notation and but open & close braces on the same indentation level (e.g. don't put the opening brace at the end of your loop/function/if/else/other statement, but put them alone on the next line). 5. Dead code. Don't commit commented-out code. Delete it. That's what version control is for. Want to know what it used to do? Look at the history, not the chain of commented-out code. Commenting out code is fine for quick testing. But don't commit that. People that follow you will see that and wonder "why is this here? is this significant?" 6. Random BOM (byte-order-marks) for UTF-8 source that is actually entirely ASCII. A lot of linux tools don't expect or handle BOM in UTF-8 sources (I'm looking at you, psql). In this particular project I'm working on at my employer, I don't think I've seen a single useful comment in the source. Sadly, the Jira tasks filed by the now-fired contractors are also nearly universally useless. All headline and mostly zero description on what the problem is, usually no steps to reproduce. /rant Sorry for the rant, when I started writing this, I did not intend it to be so. But, as I wrote, I started remembering more and more things that have been driving me nuts.