Over exaggeration to prove once point. LOC is important, but so is common sense.
A developer who finds 2 extra lines of code difficult to understand, and is ready to sacrifice modularity and every other aspect of programming, is definitely not making a strong point.
You're right, but so is (still) the science about LOC. LOC is the factor determining resources required to achieve maintainability according to science. Sometimes it helps to add some few additional lines of code to increase readability or modularity, but the science is still sound, and proclaims that there is a one to one proportional resource requirement towards maintainability and LOC ...
LOC metric as a factor determining resources makes sense only under identical circumstances. Once you change language, code style or even formatting, comparison of LOC gets meaningless.
Simple example: make a license header mandatory in each source file and LOC will immediately grow, but maintenance efforts will barely change because processing is automated and folding in IDE will preserve user experience.
Once you change language, code style or even formatting, comparison of LOC gets meaningless
Actually, this was Randy's exact point, that it doesn't matter, and he used it as an argument to prove how "assembly programming is only 25% more resource intensive than C", so not it doesn't matter actually ...
Over exaggeration to prove once point. LOC is important, but so is common sense.
A developer who finds 2 extra lines of code difficult to understand, and is ready to sacrifice modularity and every other aspect of programming, is definitely not making a strong point.
You're right, but so is (still) the science about LOC. LOC is the factor determining resources required to achieve maintainability according to science. Sometimes it helps to add some few additional lines of code to increase readability or modularity, but the science is still sound, and proclaims that there is a one to one proportional resource requirement towards maintainability and LOC ...
Notice, I don't disagree with you ...
LOC metric as a factor determining resources makes sense only under identical circumstances. Once you change language, code style or even formatting, comparison of LOC gets meaningless.
Simple example: make a license header mandatory in each source file and LOC will immediately grow, but maintenance efforts will barely change because processing is automated and folding in IDE will preserve user experience.
Actually, this was Randy's exact point, that it doesn't matter, and he used it as an argument to prove how "assembly programming is only 25% more resource intensive than C", so not it doesn't matter actually ...
I didn't say it doesn't matter. I did say that comparison makes sense only in same conditions.