[SATLUG] IO-InfoOnly: PHP Eats Rails for Breakfast

[Justizin]

On 12/6/06, K. Spoon <kell at spoonix.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 05, 2006 at 08:49:45PM -0600, Bruce Dubbs wrote:
> > I see your disagree and raise a new disagree 100%.  You are using SLOC
> > counts as a measure of quality.  Thats wrong.  You can't measure
> > productivity with different levels of quality.  The code from both
> > programmers needs to be vetted for quality.
>
> Yeah, yeah.  :)  I read Knuth's essay about how big O misled programmers
> into using a quicksort when a bubble sort was faster, too.  I'll even
> grant you that programming is 1/3 science, 1/3 art, and 1/3 craft and
> that anyone who uses absolutes is asking for trouble.
>
> But if I'm on a team where everyone else is churning out 200 lines a day
> and the newly minted BS/CS is bragging about how he's doing 500... to
> me, that's a warning sign that someone needs to go check his work and
> reign him in if need be because if you don't there's at least one (and
> probably more) 3am gdb session and a daily WTF in your future.
>

Or you have an organizational problem, such as the new guy being the
only person willing to enter a certain realm of code, eventually the
only one who understands it, and also may become more productive in
the raw sense than other team members who work in a broader codebase.

Also, a productive programmer should write about ten lines of code per
day, and some say negative ten.

> > In your comments above, you automatically assume that the person
> > producing more SLOC is producing lower quality code.  In many cases, the
> > high SLOC producer also produces better quality code.
>
> If more is better quality, then why did you reduce the SLOC by 50% in
> your FORTRAN anecdote?  Also, would that program not have been easier to
> maintain before then if it had always been 20K lines of code instead of
> 40K?
>

BTW, is anyone else in this thread ready to take this discussion to an
ACM SIGPLAN conf and have it out over a few beers? ;)

-- 
Justizin, Independent Interactivity Architect
ACM SIGGRAPH SysMgr, Reporter
http://www.siggraph.org/