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> What's your point? Simple. To go along the lines of your example: Headline: "Microsoft Word written in 50 lines of Python". Reality: The fifty lines of P

> What's your point? Simple. To go along the lines of your example: Headline: "Microsoft Word written in 50 lines of Python". Reality: The fifty lines of Python do nothing more than call a set of Microsoft libraries written in C and C++ that, well, result in MS Word. Did the author really write MS Word in 50 lines of Python? Of course not. It would be absolutely insane to even suggest the idea that this could even approach a valid metric. Nope, the author simply made use of external non-Python libraries that are the results of probably hundreds of thousands of lines of code and many man-years of work. He does not, for even a microsecond, get to claim that he wrote MS Word in 50 lines of Python. That's my point. Is it a little bit clearer now?

mikeash 14y ago
I would be interested to know that there are libraries that allow a person to write MS Word with only 50 additional lines of Python. Again, unless you write the entire stack from the bottom up, you're always depending on vast amounts of code you didn't write. So what's the difference?
- robomartin 14y ago
  Of course that was an exaggeration, a tool to simply drive the point home. It would be impossible to actually do what I suggested. The point, which for some reason you are not willing to concede, is that if you are going to claim that you solved a problem with x lines of programming language z the line count needs to be real. You can't use something like a library with 10,000 lines of C++ code to then claim that you solved a problem with two lines of Python (or whatever): import huge_code_base print huge_code_base.solve() It really is that simple. If you don't see it this way, well, that's fine. Let's leave it be.
  - mikeash 14y ago
    That's fine if you want to count it that way. I'm just trying to figure out why a few million lines of OS code gets a pass.

mikeash 14y ago

I would be interested to know that there are libraries that allow a person to write MS Word with only 50 additional lines of Python. Again, unless you write the entire stack from the bottom up, you're always depending on vast amounts of code you didn't write. So what's the difference?

robomartin 14y ago
Of course that was an exaggeration, a tool to simply drive the point home. It would be impossible to actually do what I suggested. The point, which for some reason you are not willing to concede, is that if you are going to claim that you solved a problem with x lines of programming language z the line count needs to be real. You can't use something like a library with 10,000 lines of C++ code to then claim that you solved a problem with two lines of Python (or whatever): import huge_code_base print huge_code_base.solve() It really is that simple. If you don't see it this way, well, that's fine. Let's leave it be.
- mikeash 14y ago
  That's fine if you want to count it that way. I'm just trying to figure out why a few million lines of OS code gets a pass.