It is not. You are not writing a novel here. Yes, most of the time is spent thinking. Some days there is no coding because it is spent on just trying to figure out what to do.
While emotions may run high, it's important to remember that this is an empirical dispute. It can be resolved simply by looking at everyone's git history. For myself, the least code I've written on any day in the past year is 20 lines. My average is around 100. The most is a tad over 1500. Of course everyone's different and LoC is a terrible measure and it depends on the language, task at hand, etc. But in general, most of my time is spent "honing" code; testing/fixing corner cases and working around issues in other software. "Other software" includes browsers, filesystems, databases, JITs, but mostly browsers.
I personally don't spend much time thinking about software-related problems. At the risk of sounding conceited, I'll admit that most problems I encounter are pretty straightforward. Five minutes of uninterrupted thought is more than enough to get into diminishing returns.
It would be very interesting if GitHub pulled an OKCupid and published some statistical analysis of programmer behavior. They could put many of these disagreements to rest.
I'm curious to hear about how many problems you solve with these lines of code. I guess that's pretty much impossible to quantify though. Also, what languages do you work in?
I'm not that experienced, but I had a notable experience working with a 5000+ loc app that was a nightmare to maintain and extend. The last guy had basically reinvented every wheel. He was even, in my opinion, reimplementing the DOM in places with absolute positioning. Also, the code was poorly organized, with pieces of logic that could have been easily consolidated appearing throughout the app in multiple places so that they could not be abstracted out.
After about a month of trudging through his code and making almost no progress, I basically told my manager that we had to rewrite it (I had been thinking this the whole time, but I didn't want to be the junior dev who comes in and demands to scrap everything).
Me and a colleague paired on it for about 2 weeks and rewrote the whole thing entirely from scratch, leveraging several open source libraries and writing a few tested "internal libraries". The whole thing ended up being around ~800 loc when we were done, and it had the extra features that needed to be added, and was pretty bug free.
I'm not trying to blow my own horn here, in other instances I have spent way too long pondering about code and making it way more concise than necessary.
But unless you are a truly great coder who is cranking out 100 lines of good code per day (and I have no doubt that you are), I would be pretty suspicious about the amount that you are writing. I would worry that you are placing a great maintenance load on those who come after you.
These metrics such as featured in Mythical Man Month are usually based on the SLOC count at the end of the project, divided by the time, not how much code was committed each day. Your churn might be 100+ LOC per day, but hopefully that isn't all permanent additions to the codebase -- bug count seems to be proportional to LOC.
chroma|11 years ago
I personally don't spend much time thinking about software-related problems. At the risk of sounding conceited, I'll admit that most problems I encounter are pretty straightforward. Five minutes of uninterrupted thought is more than enough to get into diminishing returns.
It would be very interesting if GitHub pulled an OKCupid and published some statistical analysis of programmer behavior. They could put many of these disagreements to rest.
woah|11 years ago
I'm not that experienced, but I had a notable experience working with a 5000+ loc app that was a nightmare to maintain and extend. The last guy had basically reinvented every wheel. He was even, in my opinion, reimplementing the DOM in places with absolute positioning. Also, the code was poorly organized, with pieces of logic that could have been easily consolidated appearing throughout the app in multiple places so that they could not be abstracted out.
After about a month of trudging through his code and making almost no progress, I basically told my manager that we had to rewrite it (I had been thinking this the whole time, but I didn't want to be the junior dev who comes in and demands to scrap everything).
Me and a colleague paired on it for about 2 weeks and rewrote the whole thing entirely from scratch, leveraging several open source libraries and writing a few tested "internal libraries". The whole thing ended up being around ~800 loc when we were done, and it had the extra features that needed to be added, and was pretty bug free.
I'm not trying to blow my own horn here, in other instances I have spent way too long pondering about code and making it way more concise than necessary.
But unless you are a truly great coder who is cranking out 100 lines of good code per day (and I have no doubt that you are), I would be pretty suspicious about the amount that you are writing. I would worry that you are placing a great maintenance load on those who come after you.
tokenrove|11 years ago