"Measly little 100k lines of code"

From
http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=29301

Comes:
"Second, it doesn't work. Nope, it doesn't. At least not in my world. It may be fine for a measly little 100k lines of system, but not for something moderately sized."

What's really funny is that he spends a noticeable amount of time dissing the hubris of the person he's responding to.

Look, folkies - how about a little compassion? Modern operating systems are millions of lines of code. Enterprise applications may be a million lines + tens of thousands of lines of markup and hundreds or thousands of stored procedures.

I don't care.

Stuff like "your silly little system" or "measly little 100k lines of code" IMHO are like "my baby is prettier than yours" - we're all parents, and we love our kids. Have some respect for the guy who spent months of long days dealing with the same kind of asshole boss and/or client and delivered something that they were happy with.

We're all on the same side.

Philo

Samir
Thursday, January 22, 2004

Samir ?
Surely you haven't been trolling other threads Philo

Damian
Thursday, January 22, 2004

Oh come now - that wasn't a troll, that was just funny. :)

But for the record, I always post substantive stuff with my real name. :-)

Philo

Bella
Thursday, January 22, 2004

Oh $%^#^%$#&

Philo
Thursday, January 22, 2004

100k lines of code isn't *that* small....

vince
Friday, January 23, 2004

depends on language :D

El Macho
Friday, January 23, 2004

"Lines of code" is a measure of liability, not of functionality.

I feel sorry for anyone who brags about how large their code base is. It means no one on that team was good enough to make it smaller, or even understand the liability issues.

It's much like people bragging "I spent $1,000,000 to get this thing" and dissing people who got the same thing for a tenth of the price, thinking that, obviously, it can't be good because it was cheaper. Money spent is a measure of liability, not of value.

Ori Berger
Friday, January 23, 2004

""Lines of code" is a measure of liability, not of functionality"

I have a word processor in zero lines of code. Not much funtionality, but I'll sell it to you for $5. Interested?

"I feel sorry for anyone who brags about how large their code base is. It means no one on that team was good enough to make it smaller, or even understand the liability issues."

How do you know they didn't have a 500 KLoC project and reduced it to 100?

Friday, January 23, 2004

Ori, I think you make a very outstanding point. I also think it might be lost on some of the crowd as programmers are often not on the business side. Solving a problem with the least amount of effort (i.e. number of people, time, LoC, etc.) is what makes for an efficient business. Looking at the particular function of a programmer, I think bragging rights can be valid. It is a method to convey to others within the field the scope of the solution. I would concede that it makes no implication on the efficiency of the business as a whole, but often that is not within the programmers control.

m
Friday, January 23, 2004

Ori,

You da man.  Words of sanity.

hoser
Friday, January 23, 2004

I once cloned the entire unix operating system in 139 lines of code. That shows how good I am. Few would have the intelligence to see the common patterns. The posters who say that more LOC is better simply have never seen fine software like my clone of MS office that is done in 842 LOC. Or my full-featured browser that works standalane on an embedded machine - 1141 LOC.

Supercoder
Friday, January 23, 2004

Your zero-line word processor has no 'code defect' liability. It also has no 'code feature' assets, so it's worthless.

mb
Friday, January 23, 2004

"Your zero-line word processor has no 'code defect' liability. It also has no 'code feature' assets, so it's worthless"

Not using Ori's logic, because '"Lines of code" is a measure of liability, not of functionality".

Saturday, January 24, 2004

something can be both an asset and a liabilty. quite common, in fact.

mb
Saturday, January 24, 2004

Take my wife,

Please.

ba-dum-bum.

Philo

Philo
Saturday, January 24, 2004

Samir???

did u watch office space recently?:-)

Prakash S
Saturday, January 24, 2004

Dear Nameless, (and others),

No, I probably don't want your $5 Word processor.

I pay relative to the _functionality_ I get. The price I pay is a _liability_ for me. The value I get is an _asset_. To make sense, they have to be equal from where I look, more or less -- or I better spend my money on something else.

To the producer, the money I (the consumer) pay, is an _asset_. The money they spend on production and support is a _liability_.  If they can get me to pay the same money (my liability, their asset) while reducing their liability, they make better profit.

If you can produce the Word processor I want for $5 and zero lines of code, I might be persuaded to buy it -- except that I can get it for $0 (OpenOffice is great guys, try it out), so I'm unlikely to pay you even $5.

In an efficient market (of which the modern "free market" is a reasonable approximation) with enough suppliers and consumers, price and value are supposed to equalize. This happens in most markets, but not in Software. Not yet, anyway.

And guys, if you can make a web browser / OS / whatever that people want to use in 1000 lines of code, why do it longer? If I recall correctly, the industry average is something like 20 lines of code / day, amortized over the entire product life. Doing something with a smaller LOC count is, eventually, the sensible thing to do.

Oh, and I can't be 100% certain, but from the attitude expressed in the article, I infer the guy things "more LOC = more value", in which case he would be disinclined to reduce the LOC. I may be wrong, of course.

Ori Berger
Sunday, January 25, 2004

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