multi-language code base

Posted Feb 3, 2025 19:33 UTC (Mon) by sunshowers (guest, #170655)
In reply to: multi-language code base by smurf
Parent article: Resistance to Rust abstractions for DMA mapping

Stroustrup has become a bit lost in old age. He submitted a comment to the federal register saying that the average dev could only write 2000 lines of production code a year (in modern languages).

multi-language code base

Posted Feb 4, 2025 9:51 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (6 responses)

That's ten lines per day of solid, debugged, guaranteed-to-work-well code.

And that figure has been pretty constant for many years.

Seriously. I doubt that figure has changed much. Modern languages make it easier to be more productive, but that's because they are more expressive - fewer lines to do more work. I don't know how many lines of solid production code I write a day, but when I get bitten by unexpected behaviour, when I get bitten by the language doing strange things, when I get bitten by corner cases, ... truly, you ARE a damn good programmer if you can beat Stroustrup's "2000 lines a year". And have your programs actually work!

Cheers,
Wol

multi-language code base

Posted Feb 4, 2025 11:29 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (2 responses)

One project I work on has 121k lines of non-blank, non-doc Rust code (as measured by `tokei`) (with other languages scattered about for a e2e testing harness or small associated utilities). The project started in mid-2016, so that's about 16k (net) lines per year of deployed, stable[1] code that I've written[2]. And that's not the only thing I've worked on in the past decade either…

[1] One service is designed to be "bullet proof" and has never gone down; the other has had maybe 3 or 4 instances of errors taking down the service (out-of-date GraphQL schemas or new variants for REST APIs), but they've since been plumbed to be handled properly and it hasn't happened since.
[2] Well, I've done 90%+ of it, but at least been part of the review of everything else.

multi-language code base

Posted Feb 4, 2025 11:42 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> about 16k (net) lines per year

Gah, typo'd the year in Python for this. It's actually about 14.1k (still way above Stroustrop's estimates). Anyways, I was also on (cumulative) vacation for about a year in this period, so it's probably actually more accurate anyways.

multi-language code base

Posted Feb 4, 2025 11:45 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

But would you fit into my "damn good programmer" description?

Sometimes I wonder about posters here :-) but I would have thought most people here would be well above average. And give them a language they enjoy using helps immensely.

I'm working with naff languages, so I wouldn't rate my productivity at all ... why write a one-line ENGLISH query, when two pages of SQL will do :-)

And VBA - it's a decent language but by $deity it drives you up the wall. And the documentation tells you everything except what you need to know - so corner cases bite you in the butt left right and centre ... oh well it pays the bills ...

Cheers,
Wol

multi-language code base

Posted Feb 8, 2025 19:44 UTC (Sat) by sunshowers (guest, #170655) [Link] (2 responses)

I like to think I'm an okay programmer, and my code output tends to be somewhere around 50k-75k lines of production code a year, on top of all of the other responsibilities of a senior engineer (planning, writing, documentation, learning/teaching).

2000 lines is the sort of figure you would achieve if you couldn't leverage modern tooling to offload as much thinking as possible to the compiler and other automation.

I pay a huge amount of attention to tests too, and in fact one of the things I maintain is a free (libre), cross-platform test runner for Rust that attempts to use state-of-the-art concepts to be the highest quality test runner in existence.

multi-language code base

Posted Feb 8, 2025 19:53 UTC (Sat) by sunshowers (guest, #170655) [Link] (1 responses)

Oh, and I forgot to mention that this wasn't just 2000 lines of new code a year—this was 2000 lines of a rewrite of a C++ project per year. That's the sort of thing that goes way quicker the second time.

To put it bluntly, if my code output was 2000 lines a year, and I didn't have a very good justification for it (like spending most of my time doing non-code related things), I would have been fired for underperformance.

multi-language code base

Posted Feb 10, 2025 10:07 UTC (Mon) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link]

Maybe the output is only 2000 lines a year because figuring out what exactly that C++ did and why took such huge amounts of time. If you need to closely examine 20000 lines of C++ for every 100 lines you write and then mirror every idiosyncratic detail of the original behavior I could see a very low output as the result.