Comment by phi-go
5 hours ago
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.