The obvious Edsger Djikstra reference:
[I]f we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as “lines produced” but as “lines spent”: the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger.
Djikstra's words (and the article's) are clearly correct, but hardly revolutionary or contrary to modern belief today.
The real question is: why, despite a prevailing belief in modern software software engineering that red diffs are beautiful and cathartic things to be celebrated, and that the great spectre of technical debt is something to be excised, why do complex overengineered systems still prevail despite all this?
This locks in the complexity, and inertia makes change expensive. I experienced this when I built a tcp socket over a request response library, and the reason was to capture the investments made in the library and suffer the pain of building tcp. This made the code complex, but it was reasonable to sell to stakeholders and achieve success on. Now, I wanted to just use a socket, but this took 1.5 years to do by slowly iterating on the right value proposition. I'm a big fan of slow massive rewrites, but it requires consistent and solid leadership to pull off.
technical beauty is not the only^M^M^M^M^M^M^M^M a metric measured by businesses.
I don't know, but I imagine it is one of the HN automated moderation actions, based on previous downvotes of that user comments.
There is "vouche" feature to minimize unfairness in these cases. If you do not agree that a particular comment should be dead from start, you can click on the timestamp (to go to the permanent link of the comment) and click on vouche. I do this sometimes. I did now for the mentioned comment (from draw_down ) because I agree with you that it is a valuable comment and it is not dead anymore.
There are myriad tools designed for these people though, and they all chose the simplest (and wrong) solutions to the problem: progress is SLOC added and bug reports clsoed per day.
The height of the software-as-art era was the shareware days of the late 90s. Development certainly moved a lot more slowly overall, but there also tended to be better relationships between developers and their users and developers were not yet all working for people who tried to measure their progress by the only metrics they could understand. The entire industry has been a victim of Goodhart's Law.
I see software now as having three different faces: software-as-art, software-as-business, and software-as-engineering. The 80s and 90s had a lot of activity in software-as-art. I was mostly following Mac culture at the time, so I saw this through Bungie, Ambrosia, BareBones, and hundreds of smaller indie developers. The environment at the time enforced the software-as-art discipline, because downloading a program happened over 14.4kbps or slower, or 28.8kbps if your parents had good jobs, and came along with yelling that often sounded like, "get off the phone!" "But I'm downloading!" Installation media was 700K or 1.4MB, and that had to have all your code, art, sound, and other resources.
That's mostly all gone now. Bungie of course got married to Microsoft, which pissed off Mac enthusiasts way more than when Jobs announced a partnership with MS to get Office on the Mac. They've done well. Panic are the only old-school indie commercial desktop software developers I can think of off the top of my head that are still pretty true to their roots.
A lot of software of course just became free. I enjoy so much more high quality software at no cost now, which is really only possible because of the massive benefits of scale that have come from all the tools that have trickled down from software-as-business.
Software-as-business really took off. Apple, Microsoft, Sun, Oracle and others were always kinda big, but not the impossibly large megacorps that they are now. Most of them were still vulnerable to serious mistakes, and that was good, because it meant the users still had some power. Now, mistakes in software development don't really matter to these companies unless they impact 8 figures of quarterly revenue, and that's a process that has zero room for software-as-art.
Software-as-engineering is mostly stillborn, languishing in academia or a few places with rigorous standards (like NASA) or still finding its footing in modern DevOps. I still hold out hope that eventually this aspect will get some love too. I think it will be necessary, eventually, but maybe not until after I've written my last line of code.
Besides postcardware ("if you like the program, send me a postcard"), I have to think of Phone Me NOW!!!:
Is the SLOC counting still a thing nowadays, though? I've worked at companies ranging from 4-person startups to an old worldwide behemoth (all in the EU, though) and nobody even tracked SLOC, let alone evaluate developers on that; all the dumb metrics came from the issue tracker. Though I have the impression your real evaluation is based on how well you work with others, assuming you clear a low technical competence bar.
Well for one, IDE's help hide a lot of the complexity by offering rapid auto-completion for even the most complex of systems.
For two, it's not something you can read and truly grasp. Complexity doesn't necessarily have an objective measurement. Even the attempts we have of measuring it, such as cyclomatic complexity, don't really tell a full story.
You could reduce a somewhat complex string manipulation down to a regex replace. But that regex replace may be far harder for someone to understand what it actually does, even if they're experienced with that particular flavor of regex.
To be blunt, 100 lines of code could be easier to understand than 25 lines that do the exact same thing. It just depends on the reader & the task at hand.
The 'real' programmer that spends a month on a long term maintainable chunk of code with a well defined API and some documentation to go with it in a few hundred lines of craftmanship will be at a disadvantage to the person that creates an unmaintainable mess half the time and that is promoted away for being so great at 'getting things done' before they have to deal with the mess.
I think this applies to software as well. It’s easier to come up with complex solution, harder to create something simple that still meets the requirements.
/**
I'd agree
that counting the occurrences of 0x0a
can be
misleading
*/Somehow being able to distinguish this would help avoid insanely complicated code (of which usually can be much, much simpler), but doesn't encourage anyone to literally ignore all error checking and do everything as some kind of chained-single-line-expression abomination [1].
[1] Something I often see in functional JS and regular python from time to time.
“Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.”
all code is investment
only time will tell
Is anybody really proudly counting lines of code at this late date? Is there anyone out there who doesn't love an all-red diff? Is there anyone who really thinks the prolix version of a function is better than the concise one, all else equal? Who is getting paid by line of code, or has to meet a a quota of LOC?
I work in a startup full of twentysomethings. None of them have read “Mythical Man Month” but they all know the bit about how adding engineers to a late project makes it later. It takes time, but these things find their way into the conventional wisdom.
It’s not 1988 anymore. Not everything changes, but some things do.
Or do you think we all still need to be reminded that “goto” is bad and we shouldn’t use it?
Even so, there are lots of other companies out there, some older, some newer, both large and small in regulated industries, e-commerce and so on who could very well use some of the common sense that pervades you and your team.
It's definitely not 1988 anymore. Contrary to popular wisdom the programmers from back then usually were clued in, rather than that they went to javascript bootcamp and started churning out reams of low quality code. Plenty of the software from back then is still around today. The Mythical Man Month writes about a team of reasonably competent professionals and the pitfalls they encounter, not about a bunch of clueless newbies.
That adding engineers to a late project makes it later is now an established fact, you would hope. And yet, not a month goes by without encountering exactly that proposition.
So yes, maybe we do need that periodical reminder that 'goto' is bad and that we shouldn't use it too, fortunately the number of languages that support that construct is dwindling, and in those cases where it is used it is hidden quite well without the nasty side effects that an uncontrolled jump into them middle of a bunch of conditionals could cause.