3 ms·

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...: “He […] had comple

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...: “He […] had completely rewritten the region engine using a simpler, more general algorithm which, after some tweaking, made region operations almost six times faster. As a by-product, the rewrite also saved around 2,000 lines of code. He was just putting the finishing touches on the optimization when it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000“

shayneoneill 4y ago
I had the exact same thing with an older job. About 15 years ago I got hired to finish a PHP project that the original developer had basically run off screaming from, and oh boy was it a super amateurish mess. No use of the OOP system, and very little in the way of "structured" coding, it just ran from the top of the page to the bottom. (I call this style "long drop programming", your code starts from the top, rapidly proceeds down, and that the bottom is a dead programmer in a noose. Oh and lots and lots of just bad SQL practice. SQL injections, joining tables in memory instead of the DB etc. So I went through the main pages and rewrote much of the logic as single SQL queries, admittedly rather complex ones, reorganized the code and broke it out into functional modules. The resulting code was about 1/3 of the size of the original. About a month into the task, I got dragged into management where a very confused project manager asked me why my LOC was negative. I told them "Because I actually know what I am doing". The guy seemed unconvinced until I showed them the original code and mine, and the benchmarks of the two. So I ended up the only guy in a team of 30 coders excempt from their idiotic LOC rules. And then a month later the 2007 stock market crash happened and that company almost immediately curled its toes and died. Possibly for the best.

shayneoneill 4y ago

I had the exact same thing with an older job. About 15 years ago I got hired to finish a PHP project that the original developer had basically run off screaming from, and oh boy was it a super amateurish mess. No use of the OOP system, and very little in the way of "structured" coding, it just ran from the top of the page to the bottom. (I call this style "long drop programming", your code starts from the top, rapidly proceeds down, and that the bottom is a dead programmer in a noose. Oh and lots and lots of just bad SQL practice. SQL injections, joining tables in memory instead of the DB etc. So I went through the main pages and rewrote much of the logic as single SQL queries, admittedly rather complex ones, reorganized the code and broke it out into functional modules. The resulting code was about 1/3 of the size of the original. About a month into the task, I got dragged into management where a very confused project manager asked me why my LOC was negative. I told them "Because I actually know what I am doing". The guy seemed unconvinced until I showed them the original code and mine, and the benchmarks of the two. So I ended up the only guy in a team of 30 coders excempt from their idiotic LOC rules. And then a month later the 2007 stock market crash happened and that company almost immediately curled its toes and died. Possibly for the best.