Once had a compiler QA gig. Was kinda lazy. So, I wrote a nonsense code synthesizer. Just take the BNF and belch out code. Millions and millions of lines of code. A fun variant was to create a class hierarchy that would run 100's of levels deep. I showed it to marketing. They asked: "Can you do that for compiler?" "Sure thang!". Soon, there was an ad showing how our compiler could handle a lot more bloat than their compiler. Not my proudest achievement.
-2000 Lines of Code (2004)
101–110 of 134 posts
Re: -2000 Lines of Code (2004)
#102It's not just old managers that dislike negative lines of code: Static analysis tools dislike them too, under the right bureaucracy. At a certain huge company that sells seeds, they decided to start having both a base test coverage target, and a specific plugin that demanded that the coverage never went back more than half a percent from the high water mark on any given project. The engineering managers thought it wa…
"You get what you measure."
Re: -2000 Lines of Code (2004)
#103I guess the management finally realized that deleting codes without breaking existing functionalities is more difficult than adding :)
Re: -2000 Lines of Code (2004)
#104I finished up a 24-month project earlier this year on a codebase of ~1M lines in which I dropped a net of almost 100k lines of code and reduced the main Visual Studio solution from 325 projects down to 105 projects. Compile times dropped from ~40 minutes to 6 minutes. If only all my projects could be that fun.
What kind of software takes 1M lines of code and 105 project? Is it one of those Java enterprise software projects?
video games codebases are sometimes this large
Re: -2000 Lines of Code (2004)
#105Re: -2000 Lines of Code (2004)
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't be so literal about it. I used to get defensive about that question too, but the truth is they aren't asking you how much you are making, they are asking you to start the salary negotiation so they can get a feel for what it's going to take to hire you and describe you adequately to a hiring manager. It's just an opportunity for you both to ballpark the situation and eject early if there's going to be a wide di…
None of what you say has anything to do with someone's current salary. If I'm in a job paying $50,000 in a market where the typical salary is $80,000 and I want $100,000 then asking for the $50,000 number doesn't help anyone. It's just meaningless data that clouds the issue of what you are willing to pay to hire me. I can understand asking a candidate what salary they're looking for. That's useful. It's got nothing t…
How do you know what the typical salary is?
Re: -2000 Lines of Code (2004)
#1074 months into a new job, and I realized I had contributed about -4000 lines of code. I thought, how weird it would be to explain (especially to someone less technical), that I'd pretty much just been deleting code since I started. I'd also added a number of important features along the way. Since then, I've taken some pride in trying to be a "net negative" (by line count), contributor to any code base I work on. Not…
There was someone at Google whose total code delta over his tenure was something like -2M. Yep, two million lines of code deleted. May we all be that productive.
Lead Google Wave developer I assume.
Re: -2000 Lines of Code (2004)
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
A good case to use code generators, I guess...
Time to write yourself a private jet.
Obligatory Dilbert:
Re: -2000 Lines of Code (2004)
#109I finished up a 24-month project earlier this year on a codebase of ~1M lines in which I dropped a net of almost 100k lines of code and reduced the main Visual Studio solution from 325 projects down to 105 projects. Compile times dropped from ~40 minutes to 6 minutes. If only all my projects could be that fun.
What kind of software takes 1M lines of code and 105 project? Is it one of those Java enterprise software projects?
Well considering Visual Studio was mentioned enterprise C#/C++ project would be a safe bet.
Re: -2000 Lines of Code (2004)
#110I had a job interview once where the HR rep asked me how many lines of code I wrote a week. I responded, "On a really good week -1000, I don't remember the exact figure." She was extremely confused by this answer and wanted me to give her a number. So she said, "I'll just put down 10,000." This is also the interview where they refused to continue unless I told them how much money I made (which I don't do anymore). Th…
What is the current average in a language like C# or Java for a skilled developer? Average that goes into production rather than what's likely thrown away.
I have senior in my title so I guess I count as skilled, I work on an Android app (so Java).
I have absolutely no idea of what my average LOC / week looks like and could not care less.
This is a really dumb metric.
Between Annotation processors & code generation plugins, it already means nothing. If you factor in DRY, it is just insane.
Am I supposed to willingly write horrible and unproductive code just to increase my LOC / time ?