Hacker News Reader

Comment by brandonbloom | Hacker News Reader

I believe it was Bill Gates:

"Measuring software productivity by lines of code is like measuring progress on an airplane by how much it weighs."

And yet: Windows 8: 20gb (vs 1gb Ubuntu) Visual Studio: 2gb (vs 300mb Intellij) SQL Server: 5gb (vs 100mb Postgres) .net: 2gb (vs 20mb Python) (All guesses and silly comparisons, admittedly)

There seems to be quite a lot of lines of code there.

To be fair, even Microsoft doesn't use the binary size of their applications as a measure of their capabilities. Yes, they are ginormous, but they aren't advertising "Windows 8: The Binaries are Bigger, so It Must Be Better!"

Bill Gates has about as much to do with Windows 8 as William E. Boeing has to do with the 787.

You can say that about all of Microsoft's operating systems.

Didn't he have some contribution to MS DOS?

He and Paul Allen wrote Altair BASIC, a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800. I believe they just bought MSDOS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC

Other than writing the check?

In some circles, that's the most important contribution. ;)

Windows binaries (PE file format) stores more than just executable code. You can store any resource data you wish; from string tables to images and icons through to zip archives (hence how self-extracting archives work).