> Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.

--Bill Gates.

My favourite consequence of measuring productivity by the line is to ask how much I owe my employer when I spend a day eliminating redundancy and thus contribute negative lines of code.

Basically every programmer I've worked with agrees that kLOC is a terrible way of assessing productivity. I think it's only "standard" in the stupid section of the industry (which, alas, is much bigger than it should be).

Actually, I've always seen kLOC as a divisor: defects/kLOC, branches/kLOC, etc. Even metrics like functions/kLOC are useful, if you believe in small functions.