Comment by sovande | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sovande | Hacker News Reader

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If you create a screencast I assume you give it your best. Look at the typing skills demonstrated in the screencast accompanying this project, https://asciinema.org/a/90r2i9bq8po03nazhqtsifksb

Judging from the screencast he use around 10 seconds per line. That would be, (10s * 1000 loc)/3600 = 2.7 hours just to type 1000 lines of code. Programming is of course not typing, but a mental activity first and foremost. Let's say he is incredible smart [1] and helped by copy and past, so on average he uses 90 seconds to program one line. That is, 25 hours. Of course it will take a few days to create a 1000 line C program that does anything useful.

And of course I know that "a few hours" is just something one say to look cool. I just don't think it is cool.

1. His naive redlock and following discussion on HN a while ago was not convincing, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11065933

>Of course it will take a few days to create a 1000 line C program that does anything useful.

You'd be surprised. Especially if you have done C for 1 or 2 decades, you can write 1000 lines in 5-6 hours easily, even without thinking, especially since those lines are for a very specific, and not surprising domain and functionality. It's not like you need novel thinking or to solve some unique challenges to build a text editor of this level. It reads and saves text files, moves the cursor around, and does some crude syntax highlighting. Big fucking deal.

Most of those lines, of course, are also quite easy to fill given C's verbose nature, e.g implementing a few standard data structures you'll need can easily fill 200 or more lines.

>And of course I know that "a few hours" is just something one say to look cool. I just don't think it is cool.

You keep insisting that he lied, without proof. That's untactful. You also keep acting as if this is some huge feat that nobody can pull off and people can only claim to do for "coolness factor".

Are moderns developers so out of touch with C?

Leaving it here for context:

"In Oct. of 1978, a month after introduction, Barnaby began coding Wordstar with new features. According to Rubenstein, who carefully tracked Barnaby’s work, it took four months to code Wordstar. This was done in assembler from scratch. Only 10-percent of Wordmaster code was used. That was the text buffering algorithms. In four months Barnaby wrote 137,000 lines of bullet-proof assembly language code. Rubenstein later checked with some friends from IBM who calculated Barnaby’s output as 42-man years."

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