Count the effective number of lines of code of a project | Hacker News Reader

Count the effective number of lines of code of a project

cloc.sourceforge.net

14 pointsFeanim7 comments

  % cloc linux-3.2.1 37595 text files. 37127 unique files. 3995 files ignored.

http://cloc.sourceforge.net v 1.53 ----------------------------------- Language                      files ----------------------------------- C                             16577 C/C++ Header                  13614 Assembly                       1252 XML                             142 make                           1509 Perl                             41 Bourne Shell                     67 yacc                              5 Python                           19 C++                               1 lex                               5 awk                               8 Bourne Again Shell               30 HTML                              2 NAnt scripts                      1 Lisp                              1 ASP                               1 m4                                1 XSLT                              6 sed                               1 vim script                        1 Teamcenter def                    1 ----------------------------------- SUM:                          33285 -----------------------------------

T=355.0 s (93.8 files/s, 39819.0 lines/s) --------------------------------------------- blank        comment           code --------------------------------------------- 1555942        1573561        8036765 316003         537441        1648074 41013          52412         252626 2881            739          40365 6296           6821          23851 3268           2592          15131 685           1552           3885 455            323           2979 561            269           2605 208             57           1524 204            237           1328 90             79            714 75             56            450 58              0            378 93              0            372 63              0            218 33              0            137 15              1             84 13             27             70 0              3             30 3             12             27 0              2              5 --------------------------------------------- 1927959        2176184       10031618 ---------------------------------------------

It's one of those things where you get excited that there's something so accurate, but also a little fearful of how management could use it to incent badly written code.

That depends on the management. There can be an incentive for comment/code ratio, with tooling to extract and measure metrics on the comments to make sure they're not trivial. Another possible incentive would be based on metrics of diffs, using a ratio of features added or bugs fixed against the number of lines added, where a smaller number of lines is better.

Why would you incentivise comments over self documenting code that clearly expresses the intent? Comments get out of date and aren't subject to static analysis.

There are plenty of techniques that let you write code that reads like an English specification rather than details of how it is implemented.

If you find yourself needing to write a comment, it's always good to think how you could re-write the code to say the same thing as the comment.

I see self-documenting code as another type of comment, not a replacement. The comments describe what the code is supposed to be doing, what business problem it addresses, etc, while the code documents how the code does what it does. Your comments shouldn't get out of date unless the purpose of the code changes. If it's just the implementation that changes, the comments should still apply.

In my experience, the density of comments is inversely proportional to the extent to which they help the reader to understand how the code works.

On my current project, it also tends to be inversely proportional to maintainability. Never send slashes and asterisks to do a function declaration's job.

Your problem is poor comments, not too many comments.

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