Simplicity is harder to achieve than complexity. Try to solve problems by removing things, not adding them.
The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases - Alan Kay
-2000 Lines of Code (2004)
31–40 of 54 posts
Re: -2000 Lines of Code (2004)
#32Re: -2000 Lines of Code (2004)
#33A gear never breaks after it has been designed out of the machine.
Re: -2000 Lines of Code (2004)
#34This is one of those posts that periodically appears, but something that's almost never pointed out is that QuickDraw was written in assembly. So, by reducing the lines of code, not only did he reduce the complexity but he also directly made the code faster by being smaller.
>he also directly made the code faster by being smaller.
Only if you assume that there are no jumps (loops) in that code.
Re: -2000 Lines of Code (2004)
#35This was pure joy to read. Management asks for something foolish and counterproductive, and then one of the top techs pushes the absurdity right back in their faces -- take this : obvious big win, but a drastic opposite delta by your crude, misguided, metric! My kids stared at me laughing very loudly for quite a few seconds :-)
It's not that funny...
Re: -2000 Lines of Code (2004)
#36Measuring lines of code is valid. The only caveat is that you must be intimately aware of whose lines of code you are counting.
Re: -2000 Lines of Code (2004)
#37Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight. - Bill Gates
Since this is turning into a quote thread, I'll throw another one in:
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Re: -2000 Lines of Code (2004)
#38Re: -2000 Lines of Code (2004)
#39This was pure joy to read. Management asks for something foolish and counterproductive, and then one of the top techs pushes the absurdity right back in their faces -- take this : obvious big win, but a drastic opposite delta by your crude, misguided, metric! My kids stared at me laughing very loudly for quite a few seconds :-)
It's not that funny...
It was if this is the first time you'd come across the concept. :D
Re: -2000 Lines of Code (2004)
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never saw this quote in the past, but apparently it's quoted a lot. And it's so true.
Too bad that it doesn't seem like Microsoft applied that philosophy to most of its products (at least not back when I used their products. Maybe they've started recently -- I've stopped following them a few years ago when I bought a Mac). I wonder if any ex-Microsoft employee ever came out and said that they actually had the explicit goal of making each successive version of their main products (windows, office) much…
I am thinking that this comment came about in the era of the OS/2 Microsoft-IBM project. It was clear that IBM had a culture of kloc being a positive metric, and Microsoft did not.
I think it is useful to keep in mind that gobs of features sell, and (was it Joel Spolskey?) someone noted that any given user needs only 11% of a product such as a word processor, but another user needs a different 13%.