public bool ShowOptional() { bool bolReturn = false; return bolReturn; } The above actually seems reasonable if you assume the programmer that wrote

public bool ShowOptional() { bool bolReturn = false; return bolReturn; } The above actually seems reasonable if you assume the programmer that wrote it was intelligent. I'm imagining that the above code is called multiple times by the application, for a new optional feature in development. Currently, they haven't developed the feature, and so we are always returning false. But in the future, we likely will want to show the feature given some condition. So this programmer has (hopefully) decided that (s)he will write the current code to take this future development into account, and rather than pass some boolean or config value throughout the code, has isolated it to one specific method. Now, when they go to implement Optional, whatever that is, that developer can just update this one method with the expression, and go about coding their feature without any knowledge of the previous code base, which is exactly what's supposed to happen.