It's striking so quickly the industry forgets that lines of code isn't a measure of productivity by Mark Seemann
Code is a liability, not an asset.
It's not a new idea that the more source code you have, the greater the maintenance burden. Dijkstra already touched on this topic in his Turing Award lecture in 1972, and later wrote,
"if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent""
He went on to note that
"the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger."
The use of the word ledger suggests an accounting perspective that was later also adopted by Tim Ottinger, who observed that Code is a Liability.
The entire premise of my book Code That Fits in Your Head is also that the more code you have, the harder it becomes to evolve and maintain the code base.
Even so, it seems to me that, once more, most of the software industry is equating the ability to spew out as much code as fast as possible with productivity. My guess is that some people are in for a rude awakening in a couple of years.
