>"There's more lines of code in a Ford [car] than Facebook and Twitter combined," Cannon-Brookes said.
If this is true, it's evidence that Ford can't hire software engineers.
If this is true, it's evidence that Ford can't hire software engineers.
Just do a simple, back of a envelope style calculation. A typical car has about 25 electronic modules, ranging from simple seat beat controllers and complex controllers like engine management units and instrument clusters. Assuming that each modules have about 250K line of code, that would take it up to 6.25M line of code. That goes up if we start to consider high end cars like BMWs and Mercs.
Let's not forget about the development infrastructure around the code development, that is another story..
Also, embedded software doesn't / can't make use of existing libraries because of code size (but this is changing)
And of course you can't really compare PHP+JS+what else in Facebook with C+Java+Assembly of car embedded systems
But yeah, hardware companies don't know how to make software
What are some of the short comings that you can see?
"Ford’s 2005 models contain between two and three million lines of code. Current 2007/2008 vehicles have an average of six million lines of code. The company is expecting about 10 million lines of code in its vehicles in 2010." http://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/en_sg/about_us/success...
Although it's an unfair comparison if you're counting all the dozens of subsystems in the car, mostly developed by third parties, but not counting the OS kernel, full MySQL source, libraries, etc. used by Facebook & Twitter.