[jmorrison]

I was going to reply with a link to Manny Lehman's "FEAST" publication page, which (tragically - and I am not being cavalier) has seemed to disappear following his passing. I highly recommend chasing links starting from his Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manny_Lehman_(computer_scienti...

It is challenging to summarize in a brief reply, and I would not do justice in any event - characterizing the relationships between the evolutionary pressures on software, the limitations of the people and organizations who produce it to handle the attendant complexity of any such system, and the feedback loops which drive the process, etc., is not a 1 paragraph post.

See http://users.ece.utexas.edu/~perry/work/papers/feast1.pdf for instance

My crotchety old geezer, "get off my lawn" take is that minimizing LOC count is vastly unappreciated (as FEAST underscores how increasing LOC count decreases the ability to evolve/change/modify software), and that DSLs are therefore far more promising than are "index cards" and "stories" and "methodologies" to decrease LOC count and thus increase agility

[ScottBurson]

Anytime someone mentions LOC count, I have to reply with this great line from Dijkstra:

[I]f we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent": the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger.