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Portable .NET Reaches A Quarter Million Lines
Pnet Guy writes: "Portable .NET is a component of the dotGNU meta project to provide a CLI (ECMA standard) platform for free software. The project true to its name runs on a variety of platform including Linux,Hurd and Cygwin GNU systems. To avoid any legal problems Pnet has decided to go the hard way and bootstrap our compiler off gcc. Unlike Mono which uses microsoft's runtime to run their compiler. Our premier developer Rhys Weatherly has contributed 254,423 lines written since Jan 1, 2001. Which amounts to about 5000 lines per week which is phenomenal for any programmer. He is dotGNU's one-man army. So join him in celebrating his quarter billion lines of his code." Update: 12/27 02:41 GMT by T : Note that as many readers have pointed out, that's just like the headline says -- a quarter million lines, rather than billion.
Some related links to check out include the
dotGNU home page,
the Southern Storm Software (Rhys Weatherley's shop, with Portable .NET information),
Mono's page and Pnet's CVS repository.
This is a question that I face at work all the time.
The reality is that you CAN make use of mediocre programmers too, but you need to be careful.
The gifted programmer can take the lead of any coding that goes on and write the core components. That gifted programmer should also design the layout of the code and properly set up the abstraction of appropriate components. The mediocre programmers can then be assigned some of the easier programming tasks, while the gifted programmer resumes efforts on the more difficult ones.
You'll never get away from having programmers of different skill levels working together. But - every project should have at least one gifted programmer to lead the way. The rest of the programmers can still be useful, and can catch each other's mistakes. They might even catch a mistake in the gifted programmer's code the odd time. When you're coding in a rush, mistakes happen.
The same person looking at the same code over and over again will get used to seeing that code and sometimes silly mistakes might take a while to uncover, because after time it starts to 'look right'. No matter how gifted a programmer is, mistakes happen. It's how efficiently you can find and correct them that counts.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
Which is still a fuckload of code. I used sloccount, which is not perfect, but is a pretty informative tool none the less.
/tmp/pnet/pnet-0.2.6
./sloccount
Totals grouped by language (dominant language first)
ansic: 121564 (81.39%)
sh: 17160 (11.49%)
yacc: 5634 (3.77%)
lex: 2091 (1.40%)
asm: 1937 (1.30%)
cpp: 961 (0.64%)
exp: 20 (0.01%)
Total Physical Source Lines of Code (SLOC) = 149,367
Development Effort Estimate, Person-Years = 38.37
Schedule Estimate, Years = 2.14
Estimated Average Number of Developers = 17.92
Total Estimated Cost to Develop = $ 5,183,332
It appears that the damn lameness filter is preventing me from posting this, so i have trimmed the output a bit.