Subject: Re: One Man's Language Comparison for Estimating Codebase Size Reduction
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net>
Date: Wed, 05 Dec 2001 20:33:49 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3216573228097060@naggum.net>

* Alain Picard <apicard@optushome.com.au>
| Are there really _still_ people using LOC to compare languages ?!
| If so, at the very least, hit us with programs with > 100kLoc 
| before making any comparison, if you want them to be meaningful...

  Well, this may restrict us from seeing some fairly useful measures.  A
  few years ago, I took over a project that had barely worked.  It was
  about 30,000 lines of C code, and amazingly stupid C code at that.  It
  took me three months just to figure out what it was _really_ doing, then
  two months to reimplement the entire system in 2000 lines of Common Lisp
  code.  As functionality grew and bad functionality was taken out, it grew
  and shrunk, but after about two years, it was still less than 3000 lines
  of code and now offered services that they had been wanting for at least
  a decade.  The C system had basically tried to invent multithreading and
  interprocess communication, which Allegro CL offered as the baseline.
  (This was before the Java craze and multithreading actually worked, and
  was one of the first, if not the first, Linux-based Allegro CL systems in
  production use.)  I would like to believe that this is the kind of edge
  that Common Lisp can give to _small_ software systems.

///
-- 
  The past is not more important than the future, despite what your culture
  has taught you.  Your future observations, conclusions, and beliefs are
  more important to you than those in your past ever will be.  The world is
  changing so fast the balance between the past and the future has shifted.