I think anything directly related to the syntax of a language is a very, very dull metric. I say 'dull', because the LOCs certainly can tell you something about

I think anything directly related to the syntax of a language is a very, very dull metric. I say 'dull', because the LOCs certainly can tell you something about the size of the project (if 3 guys crafted 3 million lines of code for a project, and 3 other guys did the whole thing in 12k lines of code in the same language, something is eery), but it is very hard to make fine statements with them. I much rather would like to see metrics which actually involve the complexity of the code involved, that is, a measure for 'what the user has to keep in his head'. The cyclomatic complexity (~#of paths through a method) is a good example of a step in the right direction in my opinion. I just don't know how one would formalize the complexity of a framework, for example, where one has to remember 'ok, I need to implement this, this and that method in my class and these contracts have to hold' and such :)