I'm consistently confused how we manage to run so many more lines of code, yet our software doesn't really do anything it didn't do in the late 90s. Back then I chatted over IRC, browsed the web and played video games. Now I chat over whatsapp, browse the web and play indie video games. In 2009 Chrome had 1.3M SLOC. Today it has 25M. And that number has been going up linearly - since 2016, not including comments, chrome has added 2.1M SLOC per year. Thats another entire 2009 google chrome web browser in code added to chrome every 8 months. Can you name a single feature added to chrome in the last 8 months? I can't. As Blow says, productivity (measured in features per LOC) has been trending toward 0 for a long time. What a tragic waste of google's fantastic engineering talent.
I pick on Chrome because the data is available. And because I regretfully have about 8 copies that code on my computer. But I bet we'd see the same curve with lots of modern software. The LOC numbers for microsoft windows have become so large that I can't really comprehend how so many programatic structures can do so little.
I once heard this architecture pattern referred to as a pile of rocks. Piles of rocks are really simple and elegant - you can always add features to your pile of rocks. Just add rocks on the top until its tall enough! Piles of rocks are really easy to debug too. Just shake the pile (unit tests), and when anything collapses, add rocks until the hole is filled in (= patch that specific issue). Then rinse and repeat. You don't need to bother with modelling or proofs or any of that stuff when working on a pile of rocks.
Look at those Haskell programmers over there building aqueducts using archways. Peh. they should get jobs writing real programs.
I pick on Chrome because the data is available. And because I regretfully have about 8 copies that code on my computer. But I bet we'd see the same curve with lots of modern software. The LOC numbers for microsoft windows have become so large that I can't really comprehend how so many programatic structures can do so little.
I once heard this architecture pattern referred to as a pile of rocks. Piles of rocks are really simple and elegant - you can always add features to your pile of rocks. Just add rocks on the top until its tall enough! Piles of rocks are really easy to debug too. Just shake the pile (unit tests), and when anything collapses, add rocks until the hole is filled in (= patch that specific issue). Then rinse and repeat. You don't need to bother with modelling or proofs or any of that stuff when working on a pile of rocks.
Look at those Haskell programmers over there building aqueducts using archways. Peh. they should get jobs writing real programs.
Ahem.
[1] https://www.openhub.net/p/chrome/analyses/latest/languages_s...