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 parvez rated 14 months ago - From the page: "There has been a trend lately, particularly where internet startups are concerned, to measure success by the number of lines of code written. People talk about the all-important "first-mover advantage" and about things moving at "internet speed", while Paul G...
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- parvez rated 14 months ago
- From the page: "There has been a trend lately, particularly where internet startups are concerned, to measure success by the number of lines of code written. People talk about the all-important "first-mover advantage" and about things moving at "internet speed", while Paul Graham -- co-founder of Viaweb and of the Y Combinator startup incubator -- lists "Release Early" as #1 on his list of lessons for startups to learn.
In a recent article about Y Combinator, Paul Graham pointed to the fact that two people had written 40,000 lines of code in three months as a sign that they were doing something right; he went on to point out that "you never see that in a big company". To me this number is, if anything, a sign that things are going horribly wrong: Anyone who is consistenly writing more than 5,000 lines of code per month is either (a) not working on a problem which is difficult enough to be interesting (any half-competent programmer can write binary searches, quicksorts, and depth-first graph traversals at a rate of thousands of lines of code per day); (b) utterly incompetent (we've all seen people who can replace ten lines of working code with a thousand lines of buggy code); or (c) going to have to throw out and rewrite most of their code once they realize that it doesn't solve the problem which they needed to solve -- with this realization most likely coming after their first release."
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