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What does maintainable mean? I propose a definition: we can add features at a constant rate, but the rate of bugs per line of code drops off over time. Linux c
by brians 10y ago
What does maintainable mean? I propose a definition: we can add features at a constant rate, but the rate of bugs per line of code drops off over time. Linux certainly doesn't meet that threshold: the rate of bad bugs is pretty constant. If we decompose it, we'll see a safe maintainable section with a monadic use of goto, and a less safe section that doesn't.
NASA's projects that do hit this standard tend to be written in CL with macros that do this.
I haven't read redis; anyone else?
- taeric 10y agoAny definition of maintainable that rules out the linux kernel, is... questionable. At best. The sheer number of committers guarantees bugs. That is not a remarkable feature. The remarkable number of committers is.
- emcq 10y agoThats an interesting model, but I cant think of many projects where the features are added at a constant rate. The deluge of pull requests going to Linux are not constant, and probably grows with the number of contributors perhaps relative to population growth of programmers (also not constant). Perhaps another metric is how long after your code is released will you be able to support it? In which case Linux and NASA do quite well.