From: commodorejohn@gmail.com
On 31 Jan 2026 10:16:27 GMT
Stéphane CARPENTIER wrote:
> >> Well, a lot of times, the process stops when it works. I don't
> >> remember who said that code is not finish when there is nothing
> >> more to add but when there is nothing more to remove.
> >
> > Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
>
> OK, I'm not proud to have forgotten that. He was probably more
> speaking about writing books than writing code, but there are a lot of
> similarities in the two processes.
Aircraft design, I believe, but it's a wonderfully cross-disciplinary
philosophy.
> So, I'm happy I never heard about a programmer paid by the line and I
> strongly hope I'll never heard about that.
I doubt anyone's been *paid* by the line, because that would indeed be
*very* exploitable, but lines-of-code as a performance metric has been
unfortunately common throughout the history of commercial computing, at
least in the U.S.
For bosses who don't understand programming and don't want to, it's
easy to think "they're being paid to produce this 'code' stuff, so the
more code they produce, the more value we're getting on their salary."
But that leads (at best) to sloppy, bloated code, and (at worst) to
capable programmers getting fired for not being "productive" enough :/
Andy Hertzfeld of the Mac team has a funny story about this:
https://folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html
(This same idea that it's churning out code that's "the hard part" of
programming - rather than understanding & modeling the problem, coming
up with a robust solution, implementing it efficiently, and finding and
correcting any bugs that end up in the final product - is what drives
the current obsession with automated "AI" coding; if a chatbot playing
dice with language can produce more code in less time for less money,
who needs programmers? Never mind that it's proving to be neither
cheaper nor quicker, and the results are worse...)
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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