2 ms·
On the other hand, the instant a manager starts making salary/bonuses proportional to the inverse of code size, you'll find that my assertion becomes completely
by mightybyte 17y ago
On the other hand, the instant a manager starts making salary/bonuses proportional to the inverse of code size, you'll find that my assertion becomes completely false. But if you start from an empty slate of two developers making a genuine effort to code a good solution, the less LOC rule will probably be pretty accurate. Especially when one program is 4x the size of the other. (See http://paulgraham.com/head.html http://paulgraham.com/head.html for a related take on the same idea.)
There are no absolutes. But that doesn't make these metrics useless.
- wglb 17y agoThere is actually one point missing from his list. I would put it after #5 and that is "write provable programs". I suspect Paul does this anyway, but it is a good thing to mention. This is scary to some, but PAIP has some very nice examples of this. And rereading this essay again shows at least part of the motivation for making arc a smaller language than lisp.