Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!uupsi!sunic!ericom!eua.ericsson.se!euamts
From: euamts@eua.ericsson.se (Mats Henricson)
Newsgroups: comp.object
Subject: Re: ada-c++ productivity
Keywords: Looking for a few lazy men
Message-ID: <1991Mar18.072252.23378@eua.ericsson.se>
Date: 18 Mar 91 07:22:52 GMT
References: <1991Mar15.224626.27077@aero.org> <1991Mar16.000624.2513@leland.Stanford.EDU>   <1991Mar16.205228.4268@grebyn.com> <1991Mar17.142756.25676@ecst.csuchico.edu> <4921@ns-mx.uiowa.edu>
Sender: news@eua.ericsson.se
Organization: Ellemtel Telecom Systems Labs, Stockholm, Sweden
Lines: 33

csq031@umaxc.weeg.uiowa.edu writes:

>Lines of code per day is an absurd measure at best.  Using it in contracts
>is just a way of lulling people who care about such things into thinking
>that programmers (and software companies) know what they're doing and
>that their output is quantifiable.

>The actual situation (as most people know) is that when you set out to
>write something non-trivial, that hasn't been done already, you're
>much more like Lewis and Clark setting out in canoes than you are like
>a machinist putting a block of steel into the lathe. This scares the
>living shit out of bean counters.

>But anyway, if you measure lines/day after the fact, i.e after the
>program has been designed, written, tested, documented, beta-tested, and
>accepted as done by the customer, you'll find 3-10 lines per code a
>day per programmer to be fairly respectable.  If the program really
>works well, most customers wouldn't care if they only did 1 line per
>day, so long as it was finished in a timely manner.

I don't understand this line-counting AT ALL. Not just that it's a stupid
way of measuring productivity, but the fact that one line of code could
be so much. If I as a C++ programmer have a huge, easy to browse, well
documented and well designed library of classes, one line of code can
do SO much work, without me ever having to care HOW it works. When I in
the future can get my dirty hands on such libraries, you can start talking
about productivity. I could design my application for a while, and then
throw well designed classes into a file, and let them do the work.

This is why I think that OO-languages will be a long time winner when it's
about productivity. 

Mats Henricson