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Comment by EvanAnderson | Hacker News Reader

Now? I've personally heard quantities of code measured in "lines of code" (or, thousands of lines of code-- "K-LOCs") going back to the mid-90's. An acquaintance who worked for IBM in the 70's said it dates back at least that far (measuring developer productivity in the "K-LOCs" they produce).

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It's been going on since the 1960s (maybe longer).

Personally, I think the best code is the code I don't write.

A significant part of my refactoring, is removing as much code as possible, by tweaking algorithms, deriving common base classes, and removing unused code branches.

Every line of code is a potential bug. The less code, the less bugs.

Negative lines of code are a good day's work.

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...

Love that story!

There's a number of times I added significant new function to programs while ripping out great gobs of code.

My favorite was replacing a function call with a single character constant.

Then there were two employers who demanded code proliferation (management incentives tied to KLOCs?). Didn't last long at either place.

See Mythical Man-Month published in 1975 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqFYsvxHZOs&t=1205s

(start at 20:05 if timestamp fails).

This Ballmer clip is the first thing I think about when I hear K-LOC.

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