To remove or disable a portion of something, as a wire from a
computer or a subroutine from a program. A standard slogan is When
in doubt, dike it out
. (The implication is that it is usually more
effective to attack software problems by reducing complexity than by
increasing it.) The word ‘dikes’ is widely used to mean
‘diagonal cutters’, a kind of wire cutter. To ‘dike
something out’ means to use such cutters to remove something. Indeed,
the TMRC Dictionary defined dike as to attack with
dikes
. Among hackers this term has been metaphorically extended to
informational objects such as sections of code.