Re: [wmii] 10kloc project, wmii maintainer change

On Jul 19, 2006, at 4:17 PM, Armando Di Cianno wrote:

> Personally, I would like to see Anselm re-word some of the sections so
> that they 'sell' more effectively to people that may or may not care
> about 10kloc. Selling the idea, the core, golden rules that Anselm
> really means when he says "no more than 10k lines of code" is much
> more
> important than feeling like a failure for having a project that is
> 10,001 lines of code.

Just to add to that... The reason to "sell it" and have it appear
ultimately respectable rather than ultimately polarizing is to
attract developers. As it stands now, those are some very bold
claims. Even though I mostly agree, I'd think twice before
associating myself, even if my project was well within the guidelines
for inclusion. To have a source for finding concise programs and like-
minded developers would be immensely useful to me personally. Even
tossing a few "almost always" and similar phrases in there would
perhaps dull it enough to keep all of the impact but lose the
polarizing nature. Ultimately, I don't think harsh words do as well
as measured ones in ALL cases. (No "almost always" there...)

> However, don't get me wrong -- lines of code is not the be all, end
> all
> marker of good code. And those "studies" about how much code a person
> can keep in their head, probably has a range of approxiamtely
> 10,000 --
> meaning, I'm going to guess, 99th percentile programmers can probably
> hold 20,000, and Joe Newbie can probably hold about 10.

It is also worthwhile to note that a programmer doesn't need to
understand all the lines involved to understand the program he or she
is creating. One can depend on a lot of libraries and other programs
because all of the complexity is abstracted away (and shifted to
other developers). I know what Anslem means by his claim, and do
largely agree, but perhaps it could be reworked in such a way that
addresses this issue of abstraction... even if only because it might
come up often and I'd get sick of hearing it. Surely Anselm isn't
implying you can't make use of all that unix offers or that you can't
use X libs or anything else simply because they're too complicated.
Where is the line between your program and the rest of the system?

- John