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176 points markx2 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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minimaxir ◴[] No.41839979[source]
> Rails, finally some open source! Looks like ~943k lines of code, 143k from Basecamp org. Automattic publishes 6.58M lines of open source code, 6.9x more than you. Yet, we’re “doing open source dirty”?

Wait, did he just use lines of code as a success metric unironically?

replies(3): >>41840106 #>>41840480 #>>41840493 #
jsnell ◴[] No.41840106[source]
I'm pretty sure it's not being used as a success metric there, but as a contribution metric.
replies(1): >>41840273 #
1. everforward ◴[] No.41840273[source]
It's not really meaningful either way. I could write a script to append "print('Hello, world!')" to the main function 6 million times, and I would have contributed 6 million lines but nothing of value. Actually, it's probably negative value now that someone else has to go clean that up.

It may also have to do with the brevity of the respective languages; I'm not a Ruby or PHP expert, but I do Go and Python and I would not be surprised if the Go version required an order of magnitude more lines because of how verbose it is and how terse Python can be.

Comparing lines of code in different languages, doing different things, with differing levels of complexity, is an exercise in futility.