Comment by doug_durham
4 hours ago
A better formulation is "every feature is a liability". Taking it to the line of code level is too prescriptive. Occasionally writing more verbose code is preferable if it makes it easier to understand.
4 hours ago
A better formulation is "every feature is a liability". Taking it to the line of code level is too prescriptive. Occasionally writing more verbose code is preferable if it makes it easier to understand.
> A better formulation is "every feature is a liability". Taking it to the line of code level is too prescriptive.
Amount of code is a huge factor but maybe not the best wording here. It's more a thing of complexity where amount of code is a contributing metric but not the only one. You can very easily have a feature implemented in a too complex way and with too much code (esp. if an LLM generated the code but also with human developers). Also not every feature is equal.
> Occasionally writing more verbose code is preferable if it makes it easier to understand.
Think this is more a classic case of "if the metric becomes a goal it ceases to be a metric" than it being a bad metric per se.
This sounds wrong, features have to be the value of your code. The required maintenance and slow down to build more features (technical debt) are the liability, which is how I understood the relationship to "lines of code" anyway.
Wrong or not, the industry embraced it.
I can sort of understand it if I squint: every feature is a maintenance burden, and a risk of looking bad in front of users when you break or remove it, even if those users didn't use this feature. It's really a burden to be avoided when the point of your product is to grow its user base, not to actually be useful. Which explains why even Fischer-Price toys look more feature-ful and ergonomic than most new software products.