Visualizing the .NET Framework

eldavojohn writes "If you're a Web developer, you should check out a quick post about the number of types, methods, & fields in the .NET framework. This was done using NDepend. The numbers are quite large — e.g. 39,509 types. The blogger went on to generate tree maps and a dependency matrix."

Comments

Compare it to the Human Genome

[wbean]

The comparison to the human genome is interesting. The genome contains about 3 billion base pairs and 30,000 coding genes. As best I can see, .NET is quite a bit bigger: The closest thing to a gene is a method (an object that can be used, or not used, and which does something). The genome has 30,000 and .NET has 384,000. So even if it takes 10 methods to do what one gene does, they are equivalent.

It takes 3 base pairs to code for a single protein, perhaps the closest we can come to an instruction. Each gene has an average of 3,000 base pairs, equivalent to 1,000 instructions. So we are looking at 30,000 genes x 1,000 instructions/gene or about 30,000,000 instructions in the genome. .NET has 8,000,000 instructions. Given the roughness of the comparison, this is pretty close.

The point here is that we are creating programs that are roughly equal in complexity to the human genome. If we were better programers, then perhaps we'd have come up with intelligent design.

Finally, it's worth noting that the functions are unknown for over 50% of discovered genes. It may be about the same for .NET :))

Re:Wow, that's a big fat ASS^H^HPI

[iluvcapra]

Monorails are efficient and sparkly shiny but are almost universally inappropriate except for certain very limited transportation scenarios (airport people-movers, theme parks, etc). They require alot of service and very expensive infrastructure. The old honda just needs a road, works on your schedule and is comparatively inexpensive to maintain on a per capita basis.

Just sayin.