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

[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?

[Mycroft Holmes]

Now there's a feat, cut and pasting from a cereal packet. I understand the quality may reflect that as a source but getting the cardboard into into the computer via the screen would be a real trick.

Never underestimate the power of human stupidity - RAH I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP

[OriginalGriff]

Nah, all you have to do is glue it to the scroll bar so it moves up and down with the rest of the code. Pritt Stick will do it if you smear it on the pixels carefully and use a big enough monitor. Boeing use this all the time for their flight control software.

Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640 Never throw anything away, Griff Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!

[Rene Balvert]

Wouldn't it be more interesting how many keystrokes you typed? if (i==1) vs var result = MyWonderfullData.Where(x => x.FullNameWithoutSpaces).Select().OrderBy().Etc().Etc() makes quite a difference :)

[dshillito]

My whole career was spent programming. My first full-time job after university was in 1972, aged 21. I retired in 2017, aged 66. So I worked for around 45 years. I used to count lines of code at various points and my estimate was that I created around 30,000 lines of debugged production code per year. In the early days it was assembly code. Later it was Pascal, C, C++, Java, VB, C#, Objective C, etc. I think the line count remained the same. I was just more productive in the more recent technologies. So whereas my 30000 lines of assembler code for a PDP11 might have occupied 64KB and was the only code running in the machine (no operating system), my final applications occupied tens or hundreds of megabytes, especially with all of the libraries they brought in. So if I did 30,000 LOC per year for 45 years I must have produced well over one million LOC in my career. And thinking back on the last 2 decades I would say that at least 300,000 of those lines are still in production: 1 desktop app, several Android apps, 1 IOS app and a good proportion of a SAAS webserver-based app. I do not think I ever wrote 10000 lines in a day, even on my most productive day. I guess I often did 1000 or more, especially when it involves a lot of copy/paste/edit. But that was balanced by other days where the emphasis was on meetings, planning, testing, debugging etc. I find it hard to believe that anyone personally (i.e without machine aid) created 10 million or more LOC in a career. E.g. 45 years of 40 hour weeks and ignoring holidays is only 336 million seconds so 10 million LOC would mean creating one line every 33.6 seconds.

[User 11783308]

All of these different methods are simply a volume metric and are roughly correlated. But, consider that for a blank link you have to hit the enter key. For a comment, you actually have to type it. For code you also have to type it. For both code and comments you have to think about it and since the comments are about the code, that is relevant. Documentation outside of code also counts in the same way, but probably stripping off the formatting is reasonable. So, simply take the size in bytes of all of the source files. Perhaps it would be worth while to compress each one and then total the size. That would tend to reduce the effect of spaces / tabs and repeated variable names and the length of variable names. Compressing everything together would result in too much reduction in size due to similarities across programs that don't really reflect much. I have found that, in practice, a simple volume metric is a very good predictor of performance and and time required to complete a project.