"The real hero of programming is the one who writes negative code." - Doug McIlroy "[T]he meaning of negative code is taken to be similar to the famous Apple d

"The real hero of programming is the one who writes negative code." - Doug McIlroy "[T]he meaning of negative code is taken to be similar to the famous Apple developer team anecdote (i.e., when a change in a program source makes the number of lines of code decrease ('negative' code), while its overall quality, readability or speed improves)." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_McIlroy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_McIlroy "When the Lisa team was pushing to finalize their software in 1982, project managers started requiring programmers to submit weekly forms reporting on the number of lines of code they had written. Bill Atkinson thought that was silly. For the week in which he had rewritten QuickDraw's region calculation routines to be six times faster and 2000 lines shorter, he put "-2000" on the form. After a few more weeks the managers stopped asking him to fill out the form, and he gladly complied." - http://www.computerhistory.org/highlights/macpaint/ http://www.computerhistory.org/highlights/macpaint/ "One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code." - Ken Thompson "Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight." - Pete Kirkham