> What's impressive isn't the LOC per dollar (or person), even at that level of reliability, but the functionality (and reliability of functionality) per LOC. I

> What's impressive isn't the LOC per dollar (or person), even at that level of reliability, but the functionality (and reliability of functionality) per LOC. It's what that 420 kLoC does. They've managed to get a lot of functionality relative to code size... because they know the cost of excess code. I don't know that I agree that the code is particularly feature dense or anything. It might be, or it might not. Just because it flys the shuttle doesn't mean it's a miracle of efficiency. Hell, it might be really inefficient for all we know. They might do clipboard inheritance all over the place because that's easier than trying to accidentally not break a "general purpose" function when making a particular change. Also, they're not writing 420kLOC every year, they've slowly accumulated that much code. The turnover I would suspect is 10% a year or less. Might only be 3% a year. What I was trying to say is with that level of funding versus the amount of features that they have to deliver (little/no interfaces, no database, no scaling, no sharding, no data sanitization, etc) it's much, much easier to get things right. This is basically firmware and the hardware is known so it's much, much easier to get it right. The web is so often broken because there are dozens of different standards by different institutions that are adhered to in varying degrees by many thousands of different projects running on a multitude of hardware. Getting stuff so right for the space shuttle is impressive for sure, but look at the kind of comparison you're making.