(fwd) article on open source

[Jerry Feldman]

John Chambers <jc at trillian.mit.edu> wrote:
>Au contraire, this is about the worst possible basis for
>rewarding  the  programmers.   It is incredibly easy to pad
>code to produce a large line count.
While certainly not open source, when at Raytheon this past year, I had 
to estimate the number of lines in the HP-UX driver I was writing because 
all the code metrics on the project were based on number of lines of 
code (this was mandated not by Raytheon, but by the prime contractor, 
and probably by the Army in this case). I do agree completely with John 
Chambers that measuring the number of lines of code is a very poor way 
to measure programmer productivity. Over the years there have been 
many attempts to try to quantify productivity. If programmers were paid 
based on the number of lines of code, we would all be writing COBOL, 
which is an incredibly verbose language. In contrast, APL is a language 
used primarily by mathemeticians (although I have seen it used for 
corporate budgets, spread sheets, and even a corporate inventory 
system). APL is a very compact language which uses virtually every 
character in the greek alphabet. It's been 20 years since I did any work 
with APL, but a single line (under 80 characters) of APL can be the 
equivalent of hundreds of lines of some other languages. 
--
Jerry Feldman
Contractor, eInfrastructure Partner Engineering   
508-467-4315 http://www.testdrive.compaq.com/linux/

Compaq Computer Corp.
200 Forest Street MRO1-3/F1
Marlboro, Ma. 01752
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