[9fans] code complexity

[Richard Uhtenwoldt <ru@river.org>]

Most of the people on this list value "elegance" in source code.  To
them, a solution that requires 1000 lines of code is almost always
better than one that requires 10,000 lines as long as both solutions
solve the same set of problems.  Let us use the phrase "code complexity"
or "software complexity" to refer to the mental effort needed to
understand a piece of code.  Number of lines of source code, excluding
comments, is the easiest measure for estimating code complexity.

Whereas the people on this list tend to view code complexity as a cost
to be minimized/pessimized, many people --including probably most
programmers-- do not.  They may object to "code bloat" as a waste of
memory or cpu cycles or diskspace, but that is a different thing than
objecting to large source code sizes because they makes the code
unnecessarily difficult to understand, maintain and modify.  Some people
actually welcome code complexity, eg, some managers and economists even
today measures programmer "productivity" in lines of source code
produced.

Few on this list are going to disagree with the statement that the
popular desktop and server platforms are significantly more complex than
necessary.  but some numbers might be fun.

The Debian distribution of Linux contained 55,000,000 lines of code as
of 18 months ago.  (Includes all software including very specialized
stuff, eg, specialized for plane pilots, doctors, etc.)  Probably double
that now.

http://people.debian.org/~jgb/debian-counting/

the Mozilla web browser over 2,000,000 lines.  gcc 984,000.  I did not
inquire whether that included the g++ code to compile C++.

http://www.dwheeler.com/sloc/redhat71-v1/summary

The idea that complexity is a cost to be minimized is not new.  Dijkstra
devoted his Turing Award lecture to it in 1972 ("The Humble
Programmer").  And yet, it is still decidedly a minority view, even
among programmers.  Why?