10,000 Lines of (Legacy) Code

UNKNOWN 2 Minutes

I think it maybe clear that you could think of this in the Malcom Gladwell’s metric, one line of code for one hour. It actually seems reasonable. I remember reading an article about Billy G’s company that average Microsoft programmer added about 10 lines of code a day to codebase.

It seems painfully slow. Obviously, yes, you can sling code quicker than this. But average it out over lifetime of project. Code writing is minimal. You spend most of your time on marketing and support, at least you should. This being said, 10,000 lines of code can do a lot, but as you approach this number the structure could get harder to extend and add features/fixes.

Legacy

Some people look down on this piece of language. I love legacy codebases, they often make me the most money. They are easier to maintain and keep in production*. Rewriting in the latest trend is very uninteresting to me. Normally legacy projects have hit that wall already they are on rewrite number 4. (the best big number release of any software?)

Lines of code (LoC) may be the only true measurement of code I can reason about… It is arbitrary and subjective but it is a metric.  This magic number of 10k LoC is somewhat historic and perhaps it should be adjusted based on language and style of application. It takes 2 lines to declare and set a variable in some variants of BASIC for instance. This is a 2x in line count for really nothing.

What happens when you are in the ballpark of this many lines of code?  You start to have a mess! Unfortunately the garden must be pruned and rearchitected and this gets harder and harder as you approach this level of code mass.

It’s a UNIX system! I know this

Jurassic Park

UNIX

Famously the original Unix source from Ritchie and Thompson cloc’s in at about 10k LoC.  They had some assembly in there as well. I’d think if you can fit an entire operating system into that small of a codebase surely we can do more with less these days.

Codebases are divided into two sections: Luggage & Baggage.  Luggage is what you need and baggage is because of what the state of the world you are building upon..

Further Reading

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