3 ms·
There is I believe a specific context where removal is good and others where that is not the right measure I'm working on some java 8 cide that was written by
by seadan83 3y ago
There is I believe a specific context where removal is good and others where that is not the right measure
I'm working on some java 8 cide that was written by folks still living in java 1.4 land, lots of opportunities there to reduce 20 lines into 3 (plus those devs kinda insisted on doing things in painful and unnecessary ways). In parallel, I'm working on a Greenfield project. Even on the Greenfield, there are times when negative code added is good. Not all programmer activities are equal
It's like measuring gas consumption during emergency braking, during acceleration, and during normal highway cruising. Sometimes it firs, or kinda fits, other times it's just the wrong metric. Programming is not a homogeneous activity
- samatman 3y agoI think we agree with each other? Or mostly so. ΔSLOC is just a metric, and what it measures is change to the codebase. Yes, some changes are very important, and others nearly trivial, so it's quantitive because a qualitative metric is a contradiction. It certainly means different things in different contexts, if it's even meaningful at all. My claim is that +SLOC is entirely meaningless outside of the tautology that it measures what it is, where ΔSLOC is in fact informative about change to the software, albeit not perfectly so.
- seadan83 3y agoI believe we would agree, yes. My hope is to convey more texture here, that programming is more than just one thing. EG: "Today I was mostly debugging". That could have its own measures. I think in large part the measures of programming productivity are often too reductive, the measure is incomplete or tries to measure "programming" rather than its _many_ distinct sub-activities.