Worth repeating https://www.youtube.com/shorts/rDk_LsON3CM?feature=share
#LinesOfCode
You point exactly to the crux that not many non-developers catch:
Code is NEVER the product, what the code does is the product.
Therefore, 'Lines of Code' is a totally ridiculous KPI.
A good developer spends a lot of time REDUCING the Lines of Code, in order to optimise response times.
Which user cares about how many lines of code it took to write the program that they are using? Users care about functionality and responsiveness.
Writing a C compiler in 500 lines of Python
#HackerNews #CCompiler #Python500 #LinesOfCode #CodingChallenge #Programming #HackerNews
How many lines of code are in PhotInfo?
@mike I think a lot of #metrics re #software and espechally #FLOSS are bs.
#LinesOfCode incentivize #messy and convoluted source. (i.e. #IBM)
#PullRequests & #MergeRequests incentivize a shitload of micro-corrections and "code cleanups" that aren't productive. (i.e. #Huawei doing to #Linux)
#Stars incentivize #StarFarming.
#Sponsors incentivize #Smurfing & #Sockpuppeting. with alt accounts.
same with #Contributor Numbers and Number of Contributions.
Frequency of Commits and changes incentivize constantly pushing empty commits as a sort-of-heartbeat.
#Forks doesn't say jack shite (in fact I know companies that do run a git mirror that regularly pulls repos from some public projects of mine.
#Donations and #Funding - if any exists at all - only supports massive projects and orgs and not necessarily key components that they too rely upon!
Today a had a revelation that reduced 3 #LinesOfCode from one of the #scripts of #autorotate_sam (I still need to push the change to the development branch of https://codeberg.org/RyuKurisu/autorotate-sam )
@SwiftOnSecurity #programming is #creative and #intellectual labour.
Measuring a programmer's efficiency or value with easy #metrics like #LinesOfCode (#IBM) or #Commits (#Huawei) doesn't work.
In fact the latter ones did that #LyingWithNumbers for #KPI so hard on the @linux / #Linux #Kernel that they were close to getting #banned from the #LKML and #git.
Instead they got called out that their "code cleanup" commits are not appreciated as code #readability is being a priority in #Linux!
I worked with early pioneers of this several years ago https://scaledagiledevops.com/ #scaledagiledevops #linesofcode #devops #coding
For the last 50 or so years, #SoftwareEngineering has been largely about how to write fewer #LinesOfCode, to minimize the amount of #code to #maintain, and to minimize the number of #bugs.
Now with #Copilot and #ChatGPT, people seem to have forgotten this, and are trying to increase the number of lines of code a #SoftwareEngineer produces per day.
Can you see where this leads to? What is the situation a company making use of these #technologies will find itself in next?
I'm just saying software engineer #unemployment isn't going to be it.
I'm not saying these technologies and #tools aren't useful; clearly they are. I have used them a lot for different purposes. They can help in #teaching software engineering, and any other topic, for example, if it doesn't matter that the material is a few years old.
We can finally have decent #chatbot #ProgressiveUserInterfaces which understand what the user wants, and understand the system they interface to.
These technologies will also evolve fast and ultimately they will change everything.
It's just that the first ideas people got of "fewer software engineers are now needed" and "now junior engineers can do everything" are grossly unrealistic. I don't mind people testing that though, feel free to make bets.
Tragically, they got the database back online pretty quickly so I've been working for the rest of the workday, haha.
Porting auto-generated #SQL from a crusty old ETL tool to, well, just SQL is part satisfying, part annoying. So many fields being selected multiple times, so many strange order-by clauses that need to be translated into deduplication/filtering rules; a real net-negative #LinesOfCode task!
@laufi Nobody will refuse such funding, but it is not strictly needed. Companies with enough purpose to support some communities or to return back some little value to the society can do enough effort (developers) to allow the #opensource ecosystem to continue alive. A nice indicator is the amount of Linux kernel #changesets and #linesofcode provided by each company (see image below). They are quite relevant. Of course, not alone: unknown is in second position.
[Source: https://news.itsfoss.com/huawei-kernel-contribution]
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