How many lines-of-code does a developer write (life time)?

[PeejayAdams]

That's awesome! I rather suspect that Lee Child, Bernard Cornwell and a fair few others have used up all of theirs by now but their novels keep coming on a daily basis, so I guess they must be using voice recognition software.

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. - Mark Twain

[musefan]

Power Puff Boy wrote:

Then you could calculate the lines of code you would need to write until you die.

Or perhaps you mean you could calculate how many more lines of code it will take until you drop dead... X|

[CPallini]

That would make my code a colossal collection of comments. :laugh:

[raddevus]

OriginalGriff wrote:

Are we talking "lines of code" or "original lines of code"?

Original? As you said, there's no original code now. Just the stuff we keep copying and pasting. I think all the copying started back in K&R C and then Petzold Programming Windows. After that, once it got onto the Internet it's all just copy code. All code can be directly traced back to those two sources. :laugh:

[MarkTJohnson]

Reacher said nothing.

[Amarnath S]

I've heard that about thirty years back (when C was more dominant), some managers used to have tools to count the number of semicolons, each semicolon signifying a line as productivity tools. So, some developers used to have lines as ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; which is as many lines of code.

[honey the codewitch]

let's see. I've written about 10,000 lines this week (strangely enough, I've been counting, and working on a single project so it's easy) gosh. im my life? I've been coding for about 32 years I type faster these days, and have a lot of time to do it these days. and I can crank out what, 520,000 lines a year if I apply myself. *32 years = 16,640,000 lines of code. we'll halve it. 8,320,000 so far. i've probably got another 10 million in me.

When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.

[honey the codewitch]

lol

When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.

[honey the codewitch]

for loops counts as 3 lines. glad i barely use linq. LOL

When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.

[honey the codewitch]

i've got a whole routine i cut and pasted from stackoverflow in my project. (it just prints an ascii tree of some data, but still THE SHAME!)

When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.

[Slacker007]

120,325,116 lines of code....no less, no more. duh. easy question, next?! :-D

[Forogar]

Apparently I still have 34 novels left. I'd better get started... "It was a dark and stormy night..." :java:

- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.

[PeejayAdams]

Reacher said nothing. He could tell from the grease stain on the safety-catch that the Glock XP3-15 had been fired three times, yet he had only heard two shots. The smell from the muzzle indicated that the first shot had been fired 42 minutes and 17 seconds prior to the first. Given that the truck had been heading east at an average of 45 MPH, he knew for sure that this was the weapon that had killed Jackson in the warehouse in Topeka, the gun being held at an angle of about 15.6 degrees so that the shell would have severed Jackson's cerebral cortex instantly. The FBI forensic team duly resigned as they felt so crushingly unnecessary ... (I actually really liked the couple of Reacher books I read, but how many do we actually need?)

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. - Mark Twain

[kalberts]

The goal of every APL programmer is to write the program on a single line. With APL, it is somewhat more realistic than in most other languages, like "The game of life" (from the Wikipedia article on APL): life←{↑1 ⍵∨.∧3 4=+/,¯1 0 1∘.⊖¯1 0 1∘.⌽⊂⍵} Thirty years ago, I did a little APL programming - but please don't ask me to explain this program. Give me at least three months to decipher it!

[kmoorevs]

I'm finding that as the years go by, I'm writing less and less new code. That is to say, I encounter fewer situations that I haven't already dealt with. Being lazy, this leads to either copy/pasta and probably some customization, or better the creation of a reusable utility function. Also, the IDEs, particularly intellisense are so much better these days than when I started...this code was generated by a tool. :laugh: That said, a rough estimate would be around 1.8M in 20 years, around 90K/year average, but as stated, the majority would have been written in the first half of that time frame.

"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse

[realJSOP]

Your boss is an idiot, and you can tell him I said so.

[kalberts]

When the VAX supermini was every programmer's dream, DEC published statistics showing that the average production volume for those developers writing the microcode for the 780 (the firs one in the VAX series) was 250 (micro)instructions a year. Everybody knows that you do not leave microcode writing to the novices - those programmers were among the very best that DEC had. Yet it took them, on the average, a full day's work to figure out a single instruction. Since the 780 was the first crop, I guess lots of the effort went into competence building, learning the tools etc. Maybe it even included some tool development. I don't know how DEC did the counting, only that the total number of microcode instructions produced divided by the number of microcode programmers returned about 250 instructions/year per programmer.

[Slacker007]

this

[Mike Hankey]

Approximately 1,243,867, but only 12 without bugs.

Technician 1. A person that fixes stuff you can't. 2. One who does precision guesswork based on unreliable data provided by those of questionable knowledge. JaxCoder.com

[dandy72]

"Lines of code" is a rather meaningless metric, since you can rewrite a line many, many times. And what constitutes a "rewrite of a line" anyway, if a single line then gets broken down into multiple lines (or vice-versa) after some refactoring?