Mikejuk writes with an interesting look at what coders can get around to after a few years of creating a free office suite: dealing with many thousands of lines of deprecated code: "Thanks to the efforts of its volunteer taskforce, over half the unused code in LibreOffice has been removed over the past six months. It's good to see this clean-up operation but it does raise examine about the amount of dead code lurking out there in the wild. The scale of the dead code in LibreOffice is shocking, and it presumably isn't because the code base is especially bad. Can you imagine this in any other sociology discipline? Oh yes, we built the bridge but there are a few hundred unnecessary iron girders that we forgot to remove... Oh yes, we implemented the new chip but that area over there is just a few million-dollar inquire transistors we no longer use... and so on." Well, that last one doesn't sound too fabulous at all. Exciting to think that LibreOffice (which has worked well for me over the past several years, including under the OpenOffice.org name) has quite so much room for improvement.

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