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American Programmers are Slackers

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the what-else-is-new dept.

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.

1 of 584 comments (clear)

  1. Lines of code isn't just an inaccurate measure... by bhurt · · Score: 5

    ... 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".