[buzzybee]

There's a pretty definite threshold, perhaps somewhere in the early 10,000's of lines(depending on the language and how densely you wrote it), where the system becomes bigger than your headspace, and at that point, I think, the real challenge for code reduction begins. And there are some very big wins possible by consistently reducing the problem into "language for solving the problem plus trivial code in that language" - VPRI's STEPS articles [0] demonstrate as much.

But it's perceptually less work to accrete a few hundred new lines to the system than to engineer a 10x reduction that introduces an entirely new architecture layer, so nobody does, or only a few research-driven projects. Programmers are, after all, lazy and deadline-driven. And while proprietary software tends to accrete due to corporate dynamics creating an environment of continuous growth, open-source projects are often built on accretion as an assumed benefit.

My own software goal, having viewed this landscape, is to be stubborn enough for long enough to score some of the 10x wins and share those so that "more with less" becomes a little more viable. I do think that all codebases go obsolete eventually, but the overall ecosystem doesn't have to depend on them so long there's data and protocol compatibility.

[0] http://vpri.org/html/writings.php