That’s what everyone craves. That’s why lines of code is still seen as a useful measure in various quarters. That’s why we obsess over IDE’s and other so-called productivity tools.
Trouble is every decent software engineer knows that actually you want less code. It’s easier to maintain, easier to change, easier to debug, easier to build on. They’ll also tell you that the best way to build big codebases is out of lots of small, well isolated, loosely coupled bits with minimal knowledge of each other.
The less code philosophy requires doing some design, pausing for thought and not cranking code. It can provide massive benefit but it’s difficult to measure in any simplistic fashion and thus is seen as pure cost by many.
More code is the hare, less code is the tortoise - know which one I’d bet on.
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August 1st, 2007 at 7:34 pm
My CTO always says: the only thing he likes more than writing code is deleting code. Less code is definitely better.