The story of Max, a real programmer

The gist of the article is a fun thought experiment.

Why count lines of code? Error handling is nothing to sniff at, especially in prod. Imagebin had a small handful of known users. Open it up to the world and most the error handling in Go comes handy.

For PHP, quite a bit was left on the shoulders of the HTTP server (eg. routes). The final result of Go is a binary which includes the server. The comparison is not fully fair, unless I'm missing something.

Lines of Code has always been a tertiary indicator at best. It's supposed to only be used as a (very) rough indicator when you're trying to figure out the overall complexity of a project. As in, "there's 50 million lines of code in Windows."

Knowing a figure like that, you can reason that it's too big for a single developer. Therefore, you'll likely need at least two; and maybe a few thousand marketing people to sell it.