[brikis98]

Author here. I very much do understand that one line of "insertion" or "deletion" doesn't necessarily mean the entire line was rewritten. But as I wrote in the blog post, there are also many types of changes missing from the data:

1. I don't do a commit for every single line that I change. In fact, I may change a line 10 times, and commit only once.

2. This is actually even more pronounced for code. While doing a code-test cycle, I may change a few lines of code 50 times over, but only do one commit.

3. For my books, a lot of edit rounds and writing happened outside of Git (e.g., O'Reilly does copyediting in a PDF).

My guess is that these two factors roughly cancel out. It won't be exact, of course, and the actual ratio may be 8:1 or 12:1, but the order of magnitude is probably correct.

[lmilcin]

You have used some numbers to substantiate an idea. Then made a fleeting mention the numbers don't mean anything. Then decided that you also do other stuff and "you guess" it cancels each other.