Comment by viktorcode

9 hours ago

It's the second time today when I see that the higher number of LoC is served as something positive. I would put it strictly in "Ugly" category. I understand the business logic that says that as long as you can vibe code away from any problems, what's the point of even looking at the code.

14 comments

viktorcode

dkersten 3 hours ago

As the saying goes:

   Measuring software productivity by lines of code is like measuring progress on an airplane by how much it weighs.

150k sounds like a lot. I do have to wonder what the program does exactly to see if that’s warranted, but it sounds bloated.

esafak 8 hours ago

Think of it as 60 man-years of work.

idle_zealot 4 hours ago
If that's true then I can ship 60 man-years of work with
yes 'println("a very important and useful line of code");' >> main.c
in under a second!

pjmlp 7 hours ago

Remember, there used to be a time programmers productivity was measured in LoC per hour.

As such, this is high productivity! /s

michaelcampbell 5 hours ago
> Remember, there used to be a time programmers productivity was measured in LoC per hour.
Do you remember such a time or company? I have been developing professionally since the early 1990's (and hobbyist before then), and this "truth" has been a meme even back then.
I'm sure it happened, but I'm not sure it was ever as widespread as this legend would make it sound.
But, there were decades of programmers programming before I started, so maybe it just predated even me.
- pjmlp 4 hours ago
  
  I do, besides the sibling comment, there is hacker lore about these kind of issues,
  > They devised a form that each engineer was required to submit every Friday, which included a field for the number of lines of code that were written that week.
  https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html
- kryptiskt 5 hours ago
  
  IBM had such a culture back in the day, where they feted 1 kloc/day programmers. That was what Bill Gates sneered at with the "Measuring software productivity by lines of code is like measuring progress on an airplane by how much it weighs" quote.

njhnjhnjh 8 hours ago

[flagged]

miningape 8 hours ago
Yes, as we all know, when evaluating which programming language to use, you should get a line count of the compiler's repo. More lines = more capabilities.
Why would I ever want a language with less capabilities?
- williamcotton 8 hours ago
  
  I mean, awk? jq? SQL?
  
  1 reply →
adw 8 hours ago

> to the extent that our systems' world models are effectively indistinguishable from the real world.
https://genius.com/Jorge-luis-borges-on-exactitude-in-scienc...
enricotr 7 hours ago

'Means' according to what? Put some (laughtable) reference so I can laught louder.

quietbritishjim 8 hours ago

Genuinely hard to tell if satire.

Just in case not, consider whether the short function

   def is_even(x):
      return (x%2) == 0

Handles a wider range of input conditions than the higher LOC function

   def is_even(x):
     if x == 0:
       return True
     if x == 2:
       return True
     if x == 4:
       return True
     ...
     return False