[Edu-sig] Lines of code and programmer time...

[Chris Meyers]

Jeff,

I have read the same thing many, many times but have never seen it 
attributed
to anyone. By my own experience I would agree with it, at least roughly.

We have converted quite a bit of very old code written in Fortran 20+ years 
ago and
we see about a 6 to 1 reduction (!) in the size of programs when expressed 
in Python
with modern data structures and objects. So you can do the math.

But then add to that the almost complete absence of a compile/link cycle 
that
20 years ago often took 2-10 minutes (still better than the batch runs at 
the
university computer that you picked up the next day). Now we really are
working at the "speed of thought" as someone coined. (Gates?)

But I think that the readability (and maintainability) is much more than a 
simple
linear function of the lines of code and that is where perhaps half of our 
time
may be spent. Mainly in very dynamic systems where requirements change
frequently.

Chris


On 16 Apr 2003 22:06:49 -0400, Jeffrey Elkner <jeff@elkner.net> wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> I seem to remember hearing a few times about a study somewhere that said
> that programmers produce about the same number of lines of code in a
> given amount of time regardless of the language.  Does anyone know
> anything about this study? (or is it a figment of my imagination? :-(
>
> I'm putting the final touches on my master's thesis comparing Python and
> C++ solutions to a set of problems, so this information would be *very*
> helpful to me.
>
> Thanks!
>



-- 
Chris Meyers