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Comment by quest88 | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why something with many LOC is a problem. Why does OP care about LOC?

More code, more liability. If you can get away with achieving the same with less code, things tend to be harder to turn into big messy piles of code.

I'm not a huge fan of rails but, you can generate apps that don't include active record example of all the flags you can pass to rails when initializing a projects.

    --skip-git            Skip git init, .gitignore, and .gitattributes
    --skip-keeps          Skip source control .keep files
    --skip-action-mailer  Skip Action Mailer files
    --skip-action-mailbox Skip Action Mailbox gem
    --skip-action-text    Skip Action Text gem
    --skip-active-record  Skip Active Record files
    --skip-active-job     Skip Active Job
    --skip-active-storage Skip Active Storage files
    --skip-action-cable   Skip Action Cable files
    --skip-asset-pipeline Skip Asset Pipeline
    --skip-javascript     Skip JavaScript files
    --skip-hotwire        Skip Hotwire integration
    --skip-jbuilder       Skip jbuilder gem
    --skip-test           Skip test files
    --skip-system-test    Skip system test files
    --skip-bootsnap       Skip bootsnap gem

Yeah and Rails is modular enough that you can easily pare it down even further - you don't need to `require` everything.

What does liability mean in the context of a batteries included app framework?

If you ever plan on becoming liable for the framework code you're doing something very wrong.

Oh huh. I hadn't considered liability implications of using a framework. Thanks for the viewpoint.

This is a real inexperienced take about a codebase with a huge number of contributors and users, with a lot of test coverage, that has a history of addressing P0/P1 issues quickly.

Do you have the same concerns about your compilers? Your web servers? "More code, more liability" is a very sloganeering/cargo-cult take.

It’s true, though. Code costs money. I looked into this years ago for a former employer and at the time it was broadly estimated that for each line of code that a company owns it costs at least $30 every time a developer has to look at a given LOC. This is true whether the dev is writing it, fixing a bug in it, or just looking at it to investigate something related. And that’s for every developer on the company. So if you have code that, for whatever reason, is constantly being looked at by developers, that cost rapidly jumps, even though no one is actually touching it.

I’m currently down with the Flu B, so don’t feel like looking up citations, and for that I apologize. My recollection is that this was, unsurprisingly, a fluid estimated, with lots of caveats attached to it. Regardless, it struck me as true, and something I’ve never failed to take into consideration when writing my own code.

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