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There were people with 2k to 10k loc of experience in some language. That seems extremely low for any meaningful comparison and I would really hope that “averag

There were people with 2k to 10k loc of experience in some language. That seems extremely low for any meaningful comparison and I would really hope that “average” programmers have way more experience than that... I think I was pretty junior after writing north of 100k loc and working on 1M loc projects. And for sure I don’t consider myself highly competent in F# after writing some thousands lines. I agree with the conclusions when they say that the design decisions are much more important than the language of choice. But I still firmly believe that the language makes a very big difference in real world projects. In toy throw away projects obviously metaprogramming cuts a lot of locs.

speedplane 7y ago
> There were people with 2k to 10k loc of experience in some language. That seems extremely low for any meaningful comparison ... It's low if you're comparing languages based on the skills of experienced programmers, but most programmers are not terribly experienced. A comparison of languages by programmers that are novices to the language is still meaningful. A language that is easier for a novice to pick up and write good code is at the very least one good measure for the quality of the language.
StreamBright 7y ago
Sure but 100k LOC Java is bot equal to 100k LOC Rust or Clojure because there is a huge discrepancy between expressiveness of those languages.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  It also depends if one is using Java 12 or Java 1.4 programming style.
  - StreamBright 7y ago
    Exactly. Even within the same lang, it does not work.
jodrellblank 7y ago
When reading about APL recently, arcfide - the chap working on a GPU compiler - has expressed that he likes APL's terse code because you can throw it away and rewrite it without too much trouble. His compiler is around 750 lines of code after 6 years of development, but[1]: "If you look at the GitHub contributions that I've made, I've made 2967 of about 3000 commits to the compiler source over that time frame. In that time I've added roughly 4,062,847 lines of code to the code base, and deleted roughly 3,753,677 line of code. [..] It means that for every one of those 750 lines, I've had to examine, rework, and reject around 5400 lines of code." Yet a 750 loc codebase sounds like someone with very little experience and a few days or a long weekend. I'm not saying only the trivial "some languages are denser than others", but also that it would be interesting to compare projects in total lines of code written including all commit history, and that it would be interesting to compare people's experiences and project designs in terms of "how many times something got implemented in several ways before settling on a final version", or "writing once and the design got set in concrete because it was too big to bother changing", how many prototypes that work differently were explored before deciding - and what that does to people's skills, and to project designs. I'm guessing thousands of lines of F# would make you more skilled than the same thousands of lines of C#, even moreso if the F# was higher-abstraction than the C#, would you agree? [1] - https://www.sacrideo.us/smaller-code-better-code/ https://www.sacrideo.us/smaller-code-better-code/
- Intermernet 7y ago
  That's the best example of why loc is the worst indicator of both work and talent available. Thanks!
- ginnungagap 7y ago
  The github link in [1] is dead, where is the repo now? I was curious about that compiler
  - vedantroy 7y ago
    https://github.com/Co-dfns/Co-dfns https://github.com/Co-dfns/Co-dfns
  - 7y ago

speedplane 7y ago

> There were people with 2k to 10k loc of experience in some language. That seems extremely low for any meaningful comparison ... It's low if you're comparing languages based on the skills of experienced programmers, but most programmers are not terribly experienced. A comparison of languages by programmers that are novices to the language is still meaningful. A language that is easier for a novice to pick up and write good code is at the very least one good measure for the quality of the language.

StreamBright 7y ago

Sure but 100k LOC Java is bot equal to 100k LOC Rust or Clojure because there is a huge discrepancy between expressiveness of those languages.

pjmlp 7y ago
It also depends if one is using Java 12 or Java 1.4 programming style.
- StreamBright 7y ago
  Exactly. Even within the same lang, it does not work.

jodrellblank 7y ago

When reading about APL recently, arcfide - the chap working on a GPU compiler - has expressed that he likes APL's terse code because you can throw it away and rewrite it without too much trouble. His compiler is around 750 lines of code after 6 years of development, but[1]: "If you look at the GitHub contributions that I've made, I've made 2967 of about 3000 commits to the compiler source over that time frame. In that time I've added roughly 4,062,847 lines of code to the code base, and deleted roughly 3,753,677 line of code. [..] It means that for every one of those 750 lines, I've had to examine, rework, and reject around 5400 lines of code." Yet a 750 loc codebase sounds like someone with very little experience and a few days or a long weekend. I'm not saying only the trivial "some languages are denser than others", but also that it would be interesting to compare projects in total lines of code written including all commit history, and that it would be interesting to compare people's experiences and project designs in terms of "how many times something got implemented in several ways before settling on a final version", or "writing once and the design got set in concrete because it was too big to bother changing", how many prototypes that work differently were explored before deciding - and what that does to people's skills, and to project designs. I'm guessing thousands of lines of F# would make you more skilled than the same thousands of lines of C#, even moreso if the F# was higher-abstraction than the C#, would you agree? [1] - https://www.sacrideo.us/smaller-code-better-code/ https://www.sacrideo.us/smaller-code-better-code/

Intermernet 7y ago
That's the best example of why loc is the worst indicator of both work and talent available. Thanks!
ginnungagap 7y ago
The github link in [1] is dead, where is the repo now? I was curious about that compiler
- vedantroy 7y ago
  https://github.com/Co-dfns/Co-dfns https://github.com/Co-dfns/Co-dfns
- 7y ago