Detect & remove unused functions

[JackKelly]

Detailed Description

It's quite likely that our code implements some functions that are no longer used. We should remove these unused functions :)

Possible Implementation

A manual way to do this would be to do grep -r --include=*.py "<function name>" for all the function names we think might no longer be used. But that's a bit tedious!

It would be nice to automatically detect dead code, possibly every time CI runs. Here's a Stack Overflow thread with some suggestions for how to do that! But anything automated should only warn us; it shouldn't automatically delete code!

[BodaleDenis]

Hi, I would like to contribute if you can assign to me. thank you!😁

[JackKelly]

Thank you so much - that would be super-helpful!

[BodaleDenis]

Hello, thanks for assign 😃
I will do my best to deliver this ASAP, but please acknowledge that I'm also a full-employed SW Engineer and I contribute in my spare time. Hope will be good, if this is very urgent please inform me so that I can leave room for someone with more free time, but I will be very glad if I contribute myself to this since it's very interesting 👍

[JackKelly]

Please don't feel under any pressure! You've chosen a great issue to work on: It's definitely important; but it's not blocking anything else, so it's not super-urgent! Thank you so much for diving in and helping out! Hopefully this will help reduce CO2 emissions ASAP :)

[peterdudfield]

I was looking at https://app.codecov.io/gh/openclimatefix/nowcasting_dataset/blob/main/nowcasting_dataset/utils.py
so I took out some functions and all pytests passed.

@BodaleDenis hope I didnt steal this task from you

[JackKelly]

ah, so, before removing functions please also run grep -r --include=*.py <function_name> in the base path of the repo to search for any other uses of the function because some functions might not be tested?