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by makecheck
3815 days ago
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The idea is to encourage the best behavior. A bad measurement encourages developers to focus on the measurement instead of the real problem, and in this respect it is worse than nothing at all. A shorter function is a great side effect but it should never be the point. I want someone who can do things like: find obsolete code, create a better algorithm, decides on a better language for the task. If I say that a system is bad because it's 200,000 lines, I may discover that developers are really good at removing comments and obfuscating code to "improve" it down to 150,000 lines. If I come up with specific performance improvements, and state clear expectations such as "find functions we never use", I end up with a more maintainable system. |
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Let me be clear: I will defend "lines of code" as a metric useful for getting and order-of-magnitude estimate of the complexity of any given codebase. Anyone using it as a metric to determine how much to reward developers is just plain stupid.
[1] - http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lin...
[2] - http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-13