On Tue, Oct 11, 2022 at 4:09 PM Rob Pike 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 > 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?” >> >>