The Modesto Kid
Molly Whiteimagine deciding which engineers to keep around based on lines of code and choosing to keep the ones who wrote the MOST
at my old job, engineers would sometimes have LOC in the negatives and that was a point of pride
Dirk-Jan Swagerman@molly0xfff Indeed, good teams reduce (legacy) code. One of my teams reduced from 1.5Mloc to 300Kloc in 7 years (using different techniques):
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-your-team-needs-code-down-target-dirk-jan-swagerman
Natanox 🇺🇦🇵🇸@molly0xfff But car salesman likes big numbers
chuckadeus kummerer@Natanox @molly0xfff he's a shares salesman
naught101@xkummerer @Natanox @molly0xfff I imagine if twitter was still trading he wouldn't be making much profit...
Viveka@xkummerer @Natanox @molly0xfff @naught101 bankers tried to sell some of the debt he owes them and inferred valuation was down to $8BN.
@Viveka @xkummerer @Natanox @molly0xfff
I have wondered if he is just intentionally destroying the site because it was too useful for progressives, or perhaps even just out of pettiness because he cops so much flack there these days. But I doubt that he's that smart or willing to risk that much money.
Daniel Rotter@Natanox @molly0xfff If you delete lots of lines you also have a high number, it's just a different one 😉
Fuck Elon 
Brad@molly0xfff I remember working with someone who was hell bent on at least breaking even before he left. If I remember right he did it.
Kensan@molly0xfff YES, as it should rightfully be celebrated! 👏
SamMakesCode@molly0xfff to be fair, they say on a good day you remove more lines than you add so 🤷♂️
TiredOldNerd@molly0xfff My father used to regularly quote Johann Wolfgang von Goethe with: "I am writing you a long letter, because I have no time to write you a short one."
I often think about that when looking at our codebase.
I often think about that when looking at our codebase.
Robin Stephenson@TiredOldNerd @molly0xfff thought that was Pascal:
“I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter."
(Letter 16, 1657)―Blaise Pascal, The Provincial Letters
“I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter."
(Letter 16, 1657)―Blaise Pascal, The Provincial Letters
@aglet @molly0xfff I guess Goethe knew the work of Pascal. Maybe this was a deliberate quote.
cognomen@molly0xfff I've gone on crazy deep-dives to optimize this or that and the PR is maybe 1 or two lines.
It doesn't tell the story of all of the iterations, all of the spelunking, all of the running in hallways away from monsters like in Scooby-Doo.
Ben Tasker@cognomen @molly0xfff I've lost count of the number of times I've had to help senior mgmt understand why it took someone days to change a single line of code and fix a bug.
@cognomen @molly0xfff wrote 500 lines, then realised there was a better way to do it, so deleted 600 lines and wrote 50 new ones. Pretty normal week of work for anyone even slightly introspective.
Absolutely.
I spent days rewriting one line of PLC code for an encoder.
But I finally got it perfect and it felt great.
The next day I wrote the other 99% of the code and finished the machine.
I can only imagine Twitter.
foxxtrot@molly0xfff Deleting old code can feel like cleansing oneself, especially when that code is full of architectural decisions that mostly just created problems.
HalvarFlake@molly0xfff negative LoC is the goal for any senior eng.
지지 ᚠᚱᛖᛃᚨ Daniel 黄法官 CyReVolt@HalvarFlake @molly0xfff why even numbers though, we can't stop here, make them counts be pointers to bat country
Phil Pearl 
@molly0xfff such bliss to delete code!
Larry Rubinow@molly0xfff Elon: print out your last 30 days of code!
Universe: collapses
Willem Janssen@molly0xfff Sometimes it also makes me nostalgic to delete code (‘aww, junior Willem‘s first li’l feature’). But mostly just happy. Reviewing other people’s cleanups? Also happy.
Kev Sturman@molly0xfff We currently have a leader board of lines removed from the legacy code, and it looks like I need to be more delete aggressive
Wayne Cornish@thatbethatkev @molly0xfff wish I'd have started one of those before I deleted 1100+ *files* of legacy code last sprint! What's the prize for 'winning'?
Joseph Kohlmann@molly0xfff Reminds me of my story from Folklore.org: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt
Brandon Weaver 
yomimono, still on land
garden center goth@molly0xfff did you see that the tesla etc engineers discussed the LOC fire lists in public channels bc they’re used to MS teams and didn’t understand slack? can’t wait for the screenshots to flow https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1588906808395333633
Gergely Orosz on Twitter
“Scoop: all of Musk’s companies use MS Teams for comms, where new channels are private by default. When software engineers from Tesla, Boring and SpaceX came in to Twitter a week ago, they created Slack channels to communicate amongst themselves. Several channels were public.”
Zalasur 🐸🇺🇦@molly0xfff Absolutely! "Look at all this old crusty code I finally nuked!" is a statement I've made more than once.
Rich Burroughs 
@molly0xfff Yeah. I don’t think that was a common opinion when I started in the industry in the 90s but it seems to be now. Especially among engineers who know WTF they’re doing.
Enhanced IDE@molly0xfff Isn’t this story from the development of the Apple Lisa as famous as I thought it was? https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt
hallvors@molly0xfff we celebrate every PR with a big, red number. (The company is named Minus for reasons 😆 ..)
hallvors (@[email protected])
Attached: 1 image Ikke meg som har æren for dette, men virkelig noe å strekke seg etter 😘 😆 #utvikling #minus #legacycodebase
Ian McLean@molly0xfff Few things bring programmers as much joy as deleting weird old code we finally don’t need anymore.
Matt McLeod@molly0xfff there’s always great excitement when we can rip out a giant pile of code.
Sean@molly0xfff I managed that at one place (at least for the first couple years). Lots of legacy Ctrl-C Ctrl-V to deal with.
Philipp Pixel@molly0xfff I deeply concur. Deleting code is huge example of an application's changeability. My educated guess is that Elon has no idea about code sustainability.
Ziggy the Hamster ☎️ 4ZTH@molly0xfff best diff is a red diff
Bran Mac Muffin@molly0xfff When working with devs on security issues one of the first things I ask is "Is this code actually used?" and "No" is a surprisingly common response. Sadly the common next step is seeing the devs commenting out the code rather than deleting it and letting source control handle it :(
clacke: exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛
eviloatmeal@molly0xfff The best days at a programming job are when you can go "finally, we're ready to delete this enormous steaming pile of a million LOC that's been festering for 12 years."
Nigel Small@molly0xfff There's going to be lots of expansion of one-liner comprehensions, and similar, going on.
Chad Hanna 🇬🇧 🇮🇪 🇪🇺@molly0xfff I was very pleased when my boss said my code was 'succinct', i.e. brief and clearly expressed.😀 And yes, "the best code is no code" or something like that 😜
Leszek Ciesielski@molly0xfff best work I've ever done, I had a net total LOC contribution several millions in the negative.
Tom Fosdick@molly0xfff I once worked for a boss who I didn't know was monitoring LoC.
One day I was super productive & deleted 200 lines. That led to a fun conversation, after which we parted ways...
One day I was super productive & deleted 200 lines. That led to a fun conversation, after which we parted ways...
@molly0xfff Red commit diff best commit diff.
Peter Gordon 🇺🇦@molly0xfff it's insane, and a lesson that has been learned many times decades ago. So stupid.
Daniël Franke 🏳️🌈@Lumpbucket @molly0xfff Yeah, IIRC IBM used to evaluate developers based on skin lines of code back in the 80s, and then they publicly stated that was a horrible idea.
Chris Green@molly0xfff after first asking them to print it off 🙈
Takiro 🎨@molly0xfff I once got transferred to support for not writing enough lines of code. Not my fault the bugs were hard to research and easy to fix with fewer code.
Press Rouch@molly0xfff “Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.”
Verwechslungsgefährte@press_rouch @molly0xfff how do they measure progress then?
@press_rouch @molly0xfff I uses a poet analogy once.
@press_rouch @molly0xfff Yes! Code is not an asset, it's a liability that we take on when we work to achieve the actual goal of solving someone's problem.
Christos Matskas ✅@molly0xfff 1990s are calling for their LOC metrics back…
Alex@molly0xfff sadly I know an awful lot of commercial people that would think exactly this way :(