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I know that in code development people talk about "stubs," which are bits of dummy code. In plumbing, "stub-outs" are blind ends of plumbing waiting for fixtures to be installed later.

Can you verb that noun? Can you say "stub that out," "stub out those [things]," or "stub that"?

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    Whether you should or shouldn't, you certainly can, and many people do.
    – Hot Licks
    Commented Oct 7, 2015 at 18:36
  • I'm sure the normal software-specific sense of stub doesn't directly derive from anything to do with plumbing. It just means a "dummy" function that's been created specifically so it can be called by other parts of a program, but which doesn't yet contain any functional code. My guess is that anyone using stub out is simply deriving it from comment out (prevent previously functional code from being executed, by converting it to comments). But it seems a bit "ass-about-face" to apply that term to a function that doesn't even contain any "real" code anyway.
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Oct 7, 2015 at 19:21
  • (To put it more bluntly, the usage of "stub out", as a verb in the software biz, is quite common.)
    – Hot Licks
    Commented Oct 7, 2015 at 20:07
  • I've never worried about where the software sense of the term came from. It's plausible to me that it comes from the plumbing term.
    – Hot Licks
    Commented Oct 7, 2015 at 23:04
  • @FumbleFingers: references to stub-outs in plumbing are much older than in programming, and the function in plumbing is the exact same. But yes, perhaps they share the common, older ancestor of "stub."
    – Taj Moore
    Commented Oct 8, 2015 at 15:31

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Yes, I'm a software developer and I have often heard and used "stub" or "stub out" as verbs meaning "to write temporary placeholders for more complicated code to be put in place later."

An example: "I started by stubbing out the interface."

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  • Completely anecdotal then, without references to work of authority on the subject matter.
    – Benny Bottema
    Commented May 18, 2021 at 11:44

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