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Comment by iamaelephant | Hacker News Reader

> Granted it isn't 10s of thousands of lines, but it isn't small either.

I'm not trying to belittle what you do, but if your good base is in the 4 figures in size then it's not large (in fact yes, it is small). When people talk about large code bases they are generally talking 100-1000x larger than yours, or more.

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True, but maybe that's partly because it's an order of magnitude smaller than the same program written in Java?

You're missing one or two zeroes from the post to which you are replying.

It sits on top of our own IP database which is 6 figures in lines and is written in C++. Java has fancy bells and whistles when it comes to IDE's, but that's all they are.

I just think it's foolish to think Java is the only language that can handle large codebases. I mean just look at the linux kernel.

EDIT: Removed comment about processing capabilities because it's irrelevant to the discussion. I left my original comments about lines and the IDE though.

I don’t think anyone is saying Java is the only one they’re saying because it has good IDE support it is better than many other languages, e.g. python. I tend to agree. Once a python program gets over 20k lines (I touched a program like that before) it’s an absolute nightmare to maintain and without type annotations can be near impossible to figure out what is going on.

The size of data processed, or the number of nodes running, has almost no effect on the quality of the IDEs.

This is true. At my last job our primary codebase was around 5 million Loc split over 400+ assemblies.

Current job I've seen single files that are over 30k lines.

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