Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacobian | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, I didn't mean to suggest he was making up a metric.

Yes, McCabe is a real thing. I haven't really found it that useful myself -- I'm not sure that you can adequately measure something fuzzy like "complexity" through static control flow analysis -- but sure, I'm willing to accept that it could be useful in certain circumstances.

What I am saying is that this guy is cherry-picking a specific metric (out of many that he could choose) that makes his tool looks good. I could just as easily come up with a metric that sorts Django to the top of an arbitrary list. That wouldn't be useful, either.

View on HN

Ah OK. Sorry, misread. Agreed. Oh and maybe the metric you're looking for that puts django on top is "# of users" ;) :trollface:.

"# of users" is a metric I use to choose which framework to use. For one, it makes it much more likely that a problem I'm having can be solved with a google or forum or stackoverflow search.

I think that alone makes it a much better metric to judge the experience you'll have with a framework than its cyclomatic complexity (at least for a user of a framework, maybe not as a developer)

A bit off topic here, but I feel that this is a terrible metric.

The reason it's impossible to find answers for how to fix problem X in Windows (besides it being terribly designed) is that there are a ton of users who are trying to be helpful and providing bad advice.

Googling for solutions to an Ubuntu problem is starting to look grim too. Read some bug reports on Launchpad and then read some on the Debian bug tracker; there's a clear difference in signal/noise.

Circling back to the original point: if a web framework is simple, you can figure out the problem by just reading the code rather than looking online for solutions (many of which are in the form "oh, framework Y automatically does Z for you so you have to...").

I don't care how simple a framework is. There are always dusty corners that are hard to understand. There will always be bugs. And the ability to get help from fellow users when you hit those is, in my experience, crucial.

By "problem" the OP didn't just mean a bug or ambiguous situation, they meant plugins, addons, etc, that the community has contributed.

EDIT: Reading his post again, maybe he didn't mean that, but the point is still valid.

Don't forget ease of finding and/or training other developers to work on a project

Reply on news.ycombinator.com