Mastodawn

> Linus Torvalds recently shared his thoughts on the misguided metric of measuring engineers by the number of lines of code they produce. In a recent interview, he criticized companies that prioritize quantity over quality, highlighting the importance of clarity, stability, and impact in software development. Learn why the future of tech belongs to those who prioritize quality over quantity.

Martin Boller

Dec 13

Worth repeating https://www.youtube.com/shorts/rDk_LsON3CM?feature=share

#LinesOfCode #BadMetrics #Torvalds

Linus Torvalds Accidentally Slams Elon Musk

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Paul Schoe Sep 4, 2025

You point exactly to the crux that not many non-developers catch:

Code is NEVER the product, what the code does is the product.

Therefore, 'Lines of Code' is a totally ridiculous KPI.

A good developer spends a lot of time REDUCING the Lines of Code, in order to optimise response times.

Which user cares about how many lines of code it took to write the program that they are using? Users care about functionality and responsiveness.

@gooba42 @molly0xfff
#Programming #LinesOfCode #KPI

Hacker News Sep 3, 2025

Writing a C compiler in 500 lines of Python

https://vgel.me/posts/c500/

#HackerNews #CCompiler #Python500 #LinesOfCode #CodingChallenge #Programming #HackerNews

Writing a C compiler in 500 lines of Python

Blog about linguistics, programming, and my projects

PhotInfo Nov 19, 2024

How many lines of code are in PhotInfo?

Tokei: https://github.com/XAMPPRocky/tokei

#LinesOfCode #Swift #SwiftLang #iOSDev #indiedev

GitHub - XAMPPRocky/tokei: Count your code, quickly.

Count your code, quickly. Contribute to XAMPPRocky/tokei development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Kevin Karhan

Oct 22, 2024

@mike I think a lot of #metrics re #software and espechally #FLOSS are bs.

#LinesOfCode incentivize #messy and convoluted source. (i.e. #IBM)
#PullRequests & #MergeRequests incentivize a shitload of micro-corrections and "code cleanups" that aren't productive. (i.e. #Huawei doing to #Linux)
#Stars incentivize #StarFarming.
#Pulls incentivize #Botting.
#Sponsors incentivize #Smurfing & #Sockpuppeting. with alt accounts.
same with #Contributor Numbers and Number of Contributions.
Frequency of Commits and changes incentivize constantly pushing empty commits as a sort-of-heartbeat.
#Forks doesn't say jack shite (in fact I know companies that do run a git mirror that regularly pulls repos from some public projects of mine.
#Donations and #Funding - if any exists at all - only supports massive projects and orgs and not necessarily key components that they too rely upon!

Chris

Jan 8, 2024

Today a had a revelation that reduced 3 #LinesOfCode from one of the #scripts of #autorotate_sam (I still need to push the change to the development branch of https://codeberg.org/RyuKurisu/autorotate-sam )

#TinkeringWithLinux #Linux

autorotate-sam

Script to automatically rotate the screen with xrandr and monitor-sensor. Also change the coordinate matrix for touchpad & touchscreen.

Codeberg.org

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Kevin Karhan

Aug 19, 2023

@SwiftOnSecurity #programming is #creative and #intellectual labour.

Measuring a programmer's efficiency or value with easy #metrics like #LinesOfCode (#IBM) or #Commits (#Huawei) doesn't work.

In fact the latter ones did that #LyingWithNumbers for #KPI so hard on the @linux / #Linux #Kernel that they were close to getting #banned from the #LKML and #git.

Instead they got called out that their "code cleanup" commits are not appreciated as code #readability is being a priority in #Linux!

Stu Eggerton May 15, 2023

I worked with early pioneers of this several years ago https://scaledagiledevops.com/ #scaledagiledevops #linesofcode #devops #coding

Scaled Agile DevOps Maturity Framework

Making enterprises feel better about DevOps transformation since 2021

Tero Keski-Valkama Feb 7, 2023

For the last 50 or so years, #SoftwareEngineering has been largely about how to write fewer #LinesOfCode, to minimize the amount of #code to #maintain, and to minimize the number of #bugs.

Now with #Copilot and #ChatGPT, people seem to have forgotten this, and are trying to increase the number of lines of code a #SoftwareEngineer produces per day.

Can you see where this leads to? What is the situation a company making use of these #technologies will find itself in next?

I'm just saying software engineer #unemployment isn't going to be it.

I'm not saying these technologies and #tools aren't useful; clearly they are. I have used them a lot for different purposes. They can help in #teaching software engineering, and any other topic, for example, if it doesn't matter that the material is a few years old.

We can finally have decent #chatbot #ProgressiveUserInterfaces which understand what the user wants, and understand the system they interface to.

These technologies will also evolve fast and ultimately they will change everything.

It's just that the first ideas people got of "fewer software engineers are now needed" and "now junior engineers can do everything" are grossly unrealistic. I don't mind people testing that though, feel free to make bets.