[lug] can't make this stuff up, folks... My 2 lines of code, errr, I mean, my 2 cents....

[Bear Giles]

On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 11:15 AM, Gordon Golding <gordongoldin at aim.com>wrote:

>
> Re: can't make this stuff up, folks...  My 2 lines of code, errr, I mean,
> my 2 cents....
>
>
> My Dad set up what was at the time the largest data center in the world.
>
>
> Standard productivity of a big development center like that in lines of
> code written per programmer per day?
>
>
> 2 lines of code per programmer per day.....   ;-)
>
>
>
Was that back in the day when programmers wrote on gridded paper that was
handed over to typists who punched the actual punch cards and somebody
eventually ran the program and the programmer got the results in their inbox
the next morning?

(In college I used punch cards in my Fortran class but we got the results
back in 15 minutes or so.  We even had accounts and every run cost a few
cents.  It wasn't uncommon for people to run out of "money" before they got
their homework to run.)

Our current productivity shouldn't be that much higher.  Well, a couple
orders of magnitude since we have dedicated workstations and can usually get
nearly-instant results, but closer to a hundred lines/day than a thousand
lines/day.  Remember that "productivity" includes the time to design, test,
document, etc.

Here's today fun question: does "lines of code per day" include test code?
I know some people who claim that you should spend at least an hour writing
tests for every hour you spend writing code.  Ideally closer to a 2:1 ratio.
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