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One idea I have about why 200 was chosen is that back then the languages that were commonly used weren't as expressive. You can often say the same thing in Pyt
by chollida1 18y ago
One idea I have about why 200 was chosen is that back then the languages that were commonly used weren't as expressive.
You can often say the same thing in Python or Ruby in fewer lines than you can in Cobol, Fortran or C.
Or put another way, of those 200 lines of Cobol maybe 1/2 to 3/4 are setup code that the language makes you write inorder to be able to do what you want vs say a Python where a smaller percentage of the code is overhead vs doing what you set out to do.
- pdubroy 18y agoI'm not positive but I think that there have been studies that show that a programmer's output in LOC per day is fairly constant no matter what the language is. I could imagine this being similar -- maybe about 150-200 "operations" is the right number, no matter what level of abstraction those operations are at. That's an interesting point about the setup code though. When you have to do explicit memory management, there may be a greater cost to dividing a long method into several smaller ones. In general, splitting up a function into smaller ones might just have a greater cost in those languages. It's also possible the development tools are a factor -- it's a lot easier to jump between various methods in Eclipse than it is in vi (for me, anyways).
- chollida1 18y ago> I'm not positive but I think that there have been studies that show that a programmer's output in LOC per day is fairly constant no matter what the language is. That may be true, I have no idea. But the point would be that you can do so much more with some languages than you can with others. To make an extreme example compare writing a factorial function with Haskell and assembler.