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Comment by zabzonk | Hacker News Reader

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zabzonk

Three things I find unlikely about this:

- You wrote 100K lines of code (I've worked on several large C++ projects that were far smaller)

- You wrote those lines in Python (surely the whole point of Python is to write less code)

- You deleted them (never delete anything, isn't this what modern VCS is all about?)

But whatever floats your boat.

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> You deleted them (never delete anything, isn't this what modern VCS is all about?)

The person said: "deleted 100k+ lines this year already moving them to faster languages"

Are you saying that when you move code to another language/rewrite in another language, you leave the original languages code in your repo?

They didn't say they deleted it from their git history. I delete code all the time (doesn't mean its "gone", just that its not in my git head).

Well, they deleted it from somewhere. As I assumed they were using a VCS I assumed they deleted it from that. Or are they really short of disk space?

In this context I would assume deleting code to mean deleting it from the current version of the software, not removing from the VCS history entirely.

Deleted from the current head/trunk of the repo, ie the deployed code.

Deleting "from my codebase" doesn't imply deleting it from history or backups. Just that the code isn't present for future edits or deployments.

The way you're talking, it sounds like you never delete code from your codebase. Do you just comment it out when you change a line to something else or replace a function with a new one? Just add new files?

100k lines is tiny what are you on about, especially in the monolithic app sass world where many Fyll stack apps that handle all business ops are probably written with Django.

Our entire business runs on 300k lines of Ruby (on Rails) and I can keep most of the business logic in my head. I would say our codebase is not exactly “tiny” and just cracking the ceiling into “smal” territory. And comparatively, people probably write even less code in equivalent rails apps to django ones. 100k lines of C++ is miniscule.

Obviously “deleting code” in this context doesn’t mean purging version control history but the current state of the codebase.

> 100k lines is tiny

No, no, it is not, or at least not in my experience (I do not and never have done web development - medium performance C++ code - I don't see how I could write, understand and support 100K lines of code in this area).

And so, what does your Ruby code actually do?

Your experience doesn't match mine. I have, mostly solo, and part time, written multiple codebases that on that kind of magnitude (it is about the level where it still will fit in one person's head pretty easily IMO). It doesn't take much to reach that kind of size. Now, if all of it was super dense and subtle code, then yeah, that would be a lot, but in my experience that's usually a pretty small part of any given codebase.

> in my experience that's usually a pretty small part of any given codebase

Our experiences differ then. Mine is that almost all of the code I write is directly targeted on the usually quite complex problem I am trying to solve. I don't do boilerplate, for example.

I tend not to have much boilerplate (and write abstractions to avoid it), but I do still find there tends to be a lot of supporting code around the 'difficult bits' (TBH, most of the code I write is supporting a small amount of relatively simple but subtle operations, but such is the nature of embedded software). But different codebases are quite different in this regard: this is why such different scales shouldn't be too surprising in different domains.