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From: Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com>
To: Rob Pike <robpike@gmail.com>
Cc: "Michael Kjörling" <e5655f30a07f@ewoof.net>, tuhs@tuhs.org
Subject: [TUHS] Re: Re.: Princeton's "Unix: An Oral History": who was in the team in "The Attic"?
Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2022 17:07:24 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAEoi9W5mkZAj0X+A=_JAKg7TsAcC1y9uE_aj7YfrR7=UYGP6HA@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAKzdPgwNUjTLMu5xfDJ6WEawy73+aBA=qgoq19MQKzzYQ0o15A@mail.gmail.com>

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On Tue, Oct 11, 2022 at 4:09 PM Rob Pike <robpike@gmail.com> wrote:

> I think it is (used to be?) a common pattern.
>
> Tom Cargill took a year off from Bell Labs Research to work in
> development. He joined a group where every subsystem's code was printed in
> a separate binder and stored on a shelf in each office. Tom discovered that
> one of those subsystems was almost completely redundant, as most its
> services were implemented elsewhere. So he spent a few months making it
> completely redundant. He deleted 15,000 lines of code. When he was done, he
> removed an entire binder from everybody's shelf. His coworkers loved it.
>
> During his performance review, he learned that management had a metric for
> productivity: lines of code. Tom had negative productivity. In fact,
> because he was so successful, his entire group had negative productivity.
> He returned to Research with his tail between his legs.
>

Was this vignette in, "The Practice of Programming"? I know I've read it
somewhere before, either there, or in the first edition of "Programming
Pearls."

In the latter, Bentley makes a quip about incentives and lives of code.
Basically, if one incentivizes repetitive code, that's one what gets; "if
you pay by the line of code, how do you think an array with 500 elements
gets initialized?"

        - Dan C.

On Wed, Oct 12, 2022 at 7:03 AM Michael Kjörling <e5655f30a07f@ewoof.net>
> wrote:
>
>> On 11 Oct 2022 12:54 -0700, from lm@mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy):
>> > On Tue, Oct 11, 2022 at 03:43:19PM -0400, Marc Donner wrote:
>> >> So, come annual review time he gets the most negative possible score.
>> >> Why?  Because he produced -480K lines of code.
>> >
>> > Whoever wrote that review should have been fired.  Absolutely no clue.
>>
>> Isn't it relatively well established, though, that IBM culture at
>> least for a very long time put heavy emphasis on counting lines of
>> source code, and that more SLOC was considered to be better?
>>
>> I definitely recall it being mentioned in _Triumph of the nerds_ as a
>> major issue between IBM and Microsoft during development of OS/2.
>>
>> --
>> Michael Kjörling
>>  https://michael.kjorling.se
>>   “Remember when, on the Internet, nobody cared that you were a dog?”
>>
>>

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  reply	other threads:[~2022-10-11 21:09 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 26+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2022-10-11 11:15 [TUHS] " Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS
2022-10-11 13:48 ` [TUHS] " Larry McVoy
2022-10-11 13:59   ` Warner Losh
2022-10-11 19:43     ` Marc Donner
2022-10-11 19:54       ` Larry McVoy
2022-10-11 20:02         ` Michael Kjörling
2022-10-11 20:08           ` Rob Pike
2022-10-11 21:07             ` Dan Cross [this message]
2022-10-11 21:41               ` Rob Pike
2022-10-12  6:59             ` arnold
2022-10-12  7:03               ` Michael Kjörling
2022-10-12  7:18                 ` Rich Morin
2022-11-29  7:31               ` Joseph Holsten
2022-10-11 20:10           ` Larry McVoy
2022-10-11 20:14             ` Michael Kjörling
2022-10-11 20:33               ` [TUHS] LOC [was " Charles H Sauer (he/him)
2022-11-07 17:50                 ` [TUHS] " Warner Losh
2022-11-07 19:57                   ` Bakul Shah
2022-11-07 20:11                   ` Dan Cross
2022-11-08 18:55                   ` Marc Donner
2022-11-09  8:41                     ` Dan Cross
2022-11-09  8:49                       ` arnold
2022-11-09 20:17                         ` Dave Horsfall
2022-11-09  9:01                       ` steve jenkin
2022-11-09 10:55                         ` Brad Spencer
2022-11-09 11:56                         ` Stuart Remphrey

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