I agree with some of the other comments made about this article. Lines of code is a very ambigeous way to measure productivity; however, it is frequently used by Lazy, ignorant (they don't know about programming) managers. Lines of code -- in what language? Assembly language, COBOL, C, C++, JAVA, PL/1, PASCAL, SQL, PERL, HTML??? Are comments "lines of code"? How do managers / consultants measure the time to properly design a project? Design time of a large commercial project is often 60% to 80% of the total time spent developing a system - and yet not one line of code is written during the design time. Is good design work "unproductive"??? It is difficult to impossible to write good code without knowing in nit-picking detail what you are going to do. P.S. I once wrote a little over 1800 lines of PL/6 (a pl/1 like language) for gathering internal statistics for a relational database navagator in just under a month. Do the math! But I also had a through knowledge of what I was doing.
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I agree with some of the other comments made about this article. Lines of code is a very ambigeous way to measure productivity; however, it is frequently used by Lazy, ignorant (they don't know about programming) managers. Lines of code -- in what language? Assembly language, COBOL, C, C++, JAVA, PL/1, PASCAL, SQL, PERL, HTML??? Are comments "lines of code"? How do managers / consultants measure the time to properly design a project? Design time of a large commercial project is often 60% to 80% of the total time spent developing a system - and yet not one line of code is written during the design time. Is good design work "unproductive"??? It is difficult to impossible to write good code without knowing in nit-picking detail what you are going to do.
P.S. I once wrote a little over 1800 lines of PL/6 (a pl/1 like language) for gathering internal statistics for a relational database navagator in just under a month. Do the math! But I also had a through knowledge of what I was doing.