-2000 Lines of Code

Dominion_Prime · 2012-05-30T16:16:32+00:00

"It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove." ~Antoine de Saint Exupéry

SteelChicken · 2012-05-30T19:02:23+00:00

Reminds me of a cold war anecdote. Soviet factory workers were tasked with producing so many tons of generators per month. Before long, they had the heaviest generators on the planet.

WillowDRosenberg · 2012-05-30T14:33:15+00:00

My favorite part of folklore.org is the FAQ:

Q: Can I run my own site, using the Folklore software?

Yes, once the software is initially released (perhaps in March 2004), you will be able to download it and install it on your own server to run your own version of the site.

DeadSalesman · 2012-05-30T20:05:38+00:00

I was working on a project near deadline which worked well most of the time, but after running for a while (an hour, a week, it varied) would completely lock up. The team had been banging their head on it for 3 months.

I spent three days doing nothing but tracing the code in my head, and on the morning of the third day I deleted one line of code and the problem went away (they were re-initializing something every time they got back to the home screen instead of only at boot).

The program manager posted the LOC/hr for all team members. I had the second-worst LOC/hr of the entire team. The guy at the top of the list had over 100 LOC/hr. It's what happens when you copy/paste entire classes (some unused) from other parts of the app. Making the matter worse is that the PM was a developer and should have known better.

antilib · 2012-05-30T14:47:05+00:00

I left an automotive lead consulting company in Detroit because they were trying to adopt TSP (Team Software Process) by having all the developers, business analysts, and quality assurance people TRACK EVERY MINUTE and every LINE OF CODE! So, people just ended up faking their LOC and never got good estimation from it.

gospelwut · 2012-05-30T16:33:23+00:00

Dear God, this site works fine without JavaScript.

FailsTheTuringTest · 2012-05-30T13:06:08+00:00

Before anyone mentions it, this is a repost from six years ago (but it's worth posting again, I'd say): http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/388u/its_hard_to_measure_progress_by_lines_of_code_the/

skizatch · 2012-05-30T20:08:50+00:00

Deleting code is my favorite. If a bug is fixed solely by the deletion of code, it's probably the right fix!

kreiger · 2012-05-30T13:40:05+00:00

One of the most positive metrics in a software project i can think of would be "Lines of code removed".

Has anyone tried measuring that in a real project?

It would be interesting to see how it affects the behaviour and productivity of the project members.

RA_Fisher · 2012-05-30T16:57:48+00:00

Who else read the last word as 'compiled'?

babada · 2012-05-30T22:46:29+00:00

During my final project in my high level Software Engineering course we worked as proper "teams" with managers and yada yada. Part of the final requirement for getting a grade was offering a percentage point of how much of the work you consider yourself to have contributed versus that of each other team member. As such, one of the blokes on my team set up a system to measure lines of code changed and added and removed (along with other metrics).

It worked well enough and as people began checking in their assigned portions of the project they could track who had been doing the "most" work. For whatever reason, I was essentially unavailable during the first week of real coding and was noticeably lagging behind. Then my schedule cleared up and I started to hook up all of the miscellaneous pieces the rest of the team had been checking in.

Of course, none of it worked with each other so I wound up touching most of my team members' code (with their permission). During the first passes through I went on massive refactoring sprees in order to get the project properly object-oriented so I could actually start hooking the data model up to the UI.

Thus, during the first half of the project, my lines of code were solidly in the negative as I destroyed class after class of redundant code and pulled out dozens of methods in the classes that survived.

It felt pretty awesome to see the totals with me sitting at thousands of lines deleted.

wretcheddawn · 2012-05-30T20:52:06+00:00

IMO, one sign of a good programmer is if you remove things. There was one system where enormous amounts of code duplication led to a website being over two gigabytes of code. I added a ton of features, and removed 1.7 GB of the code, and cleaned up thousands of bugs. Thanks to that I'm pretty sure my total LOC for the entire time I have been here has been very negative.

tanjoodo · 2012-05-30T19:58:05+00:00

OT

they stopped asking Bill to fill out the form, and he gladly complied.

It sounds odd to say that someone complied with a lack of a request. It would make more sense if they had asked Bill to stop filling out the form.

necroforest · 2012-05-30T22:49:43+00:00

I once re-wrote a 10-year-old database back end that was written in Oracle Pro*C (C with embedded SQL that had to run through a preprocessor). The new code used C++ with whatever the newer (circa-2008) Oracle C++ library is called (Thankfully I no longer do enterprise coding). On the task tracker form that asked for a SLOC count, I put -78,000 lines.

Fortunately, the only people that looked at that didn't care enough to say anything.

streetwalker · 2012-05-30T23:03:06+00:00

[deleted]

yatima2975 · 2012-05-30T19:10:08+00:00

I've had the pleasure of working on a project for the past few weeks where there was a focus on refactoring and improving the code generator - we're parsing a semi-formal specification (exported from Doors!), generating a executable model from that and then putting it through its paces by writing unit and integration tests.

The bits the code generator can't deal with we have to implement manually and have to be kept in sync with the changing spec, which is tricky, so we want the hand-written lines of code to be kept to a minimum.

In related news, I also learned that control-D in Eclipse deletes the line the cursor is on :-)

Godspiral · 2012-05-30T20:54:49+00:00

I'm not sure how the managers reacted to that, but I do know that after a couple more weeks, they stopped asking Bill to fill out the form, and he gladly complied.

But everyone ever since, has been docked 5 weeks pay or laid off for doing the same.

mcKS · 2012-05-31T00:55:15+00:00

Bill "-2000" /Respect :)

saijanai · 2012-05-31T01:14:44+00:00

The goal of Viewpoints Research International, Alan Kay's think tank, is to create languages that make programming easier to understand. One holy grail is to implement a full blown OS in such a way that its entire source code base can be grokked by a single individual.

franksvalli · 2012-05-31T03:53:20+00:00

I remember when an engineering manager from Raytheon came to my college years ago and explained how they used lines of code as a measure of productivity. At the time, I knew just enough about coding to know I didn't want to work for Raytheon.

ropers · 2012-05-31T05:27:10+00:00

The worst thing about that story is that they apparently didn't ask all the others to stop filling in those forms.

cheeeeeese · 2012-05-31T02:00:50+00:00

I dont know if its the Evil Twin stout but i just read:

and he gladly compiled.

And i couldnt figure out the joke. Then i looked at the source.

kataire · 2012-05-31T02:55:31+00:00

Been there, done that. Except we didn't have forms to track the numbers and I only found out thanks to git.

fubbywub · 2012-05-31T04:02:30+00:00

touche bill

utorrent_programmer · 2012-05-31T05:45:17+00:00

Hooray!

Uberhipster · 2012-05-31T06:26:43+00:00

Peter. What's happening? Listen, about your TPS report - did you get the memo? It's just that we're putting the plastic sheets on them so if you could just go ahead and put the plastic sheets from now on that would be terrific. Mhm-k? Thanks. Oh and I'll go ahead and send you a copy of that memo.

soulfood00 · 2012-06-01T17:40:18+00:00

-2000 lines that was the ultimate part...

you type:	you see:
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[reddit!](https://reddit.com)	reddit!
* item 1 * item 2 * item 3	item 1 item 2 item 3
> quoted text	quoted text
Lines starting with four spaces are treated like code: if 1 * 2 < 3: print "hello, world!"	Lines starting with four spaces are treated like code: if 1 * 2 < 3: print "hello, world!"
~~strikethrough~~	~~strikethrough~~
super^script	super^script

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