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.