Slashdot Mirror
American Programmers are Slackers
Amigan sent us a
"Story on the CNN website how that in a world wide
survey of programmers, American programmers are
half as productive - based on Lines of Code generated!"
Allright, I'm lazy, but in Perl thats ok. I find LOC a shoddy
indicator of programmer laziness, but those numbers
seem low- I mean, I probably wrote 15,000 lines of code last year,
ran Slashdot, and was a full time student. I gotta put up
a poll.
... it's downright deadly. Using LoC as a measure of programming productivity:
- Encourages cut&paste programming ("Look- I just wrote 2000 lines of working code without touching the keyboard!"). The danger of cut&paste programming was ablely demonstrated with the Y2K problem- simply fixing the problem in one place doesn't fix the problem, you have to find all the places that code was copied to and fix it there as well. What should have been a 30-minute fix turned into a multi-year code spelunking expedition.
- discourages black-box reuse- both of older code and of existing libraries.
- discriminates against maintainance programming-
did Linus write 5K lines of code this year? Not much more, in either case. Is he lazy? Of course not.
- discriminates against testing and debugging. I'm a middlin-decent typist (for a programmer), and I can type in one to two thousand lines of code in a single day. Testing and debugging said code can take days or even weeks- during which my code output is exceeding low to non-existant. Last year there was an entire month of busting my butt where my sum total code output was 2 lines (finding the two lines of code in the device driver to fix was a bitch).
- Discriminates against time spent on design. Especially design which increases code reuse, and decreases code complexity and size.
- Discriminates against writting documentation (that's not code).
In fact, LoC Discrimates against all parts of programming _except_ the typing parts.
Programming is not an assembly line production, no matter how much some managers wish it were. There are no easy measurements of programmer productivity. And I do not beleive the American programmer is "lazy".
I don't really know why it would be American versus the rest of the world or whatever, but I have always considered laziness as a virtue. Generally it motivates people to produce time/energy savers such as cars, compilers (I know, some of us just love to handcode stuff in whatever our favorite executible format is, but personally I dig how much C and perl accomplish...) and toilets.
I cannot even vote for how many lines of code I have written. Probably 100 different projects between 10 and 1000 lines of code, but most of them really involve cutting and pasting. Hell, if I wasn't so lazy I would probably be using more modular code than I already do and thus write even FEWER lines of code.
I expect on the otherhand that they didn't actually ask any of the Microsoft OS developers. From what I understand they write kajillions of lines of code, as they have to rewrite the OS over again everytime they make a revision.
Wheras with Linux generally you take someone elses code and rewrite the important differences.
So is OpenSource's real value the way it supports laziness? I mean there are all sorts of projects I have done where I have looked for appropriate open sourced code before hand coding. Is this wrong? I would say that a real measurement of productivity would be how much a single programer could accomplish with the fewest number of lines but since the majority of the lines of code written by US programmers are actual productivity wasters like games it is somewhat ironic...
Productivity is measured by how much work an individual can accomplish in a consistent amount of time. The notion that writing more lines of code as getting MORE done in less time is far fetched.
Lazy=good or we would still be hunter gatherers.
DLG