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That's a great story. I can't resist quoting Dijkstra: If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced", but as "lines spent" -- the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger.

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I am very inspired by Dijkstra's high level ideas on programming. Importantly, one of the fundamental assumptions of Dijkstra was that you could actually understand your code base and reason about it. The creation of excessive abstraction may create a degree of robustness that protects against programmer's who don't understand the code base, under the assumption that no one will, but at the cost of eventually ensuring that no one will be able to understand the entirety of the code base or even reason at the macro and micro levels efficiently at the same time for a large part of the code base.

"the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger."

Never seen that. Thanks for sharing as it might be a great way to drive point home to business types. The amount of code certainly turns [for developers] from asset into a liability as it's size and usage grows. Hmm. Maybe such a presentation could always consider the amount of code a liability or neutral asset that produced benefits on the other side or reduced them. A well-stated connection between the two might justify reducing technical debt.

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