Re: Larkins website sucks[was Re: Bill Sux]

On Sun, 04 Sep 2005 22:37:34 -0700, John Larkin wrote:

> On Sun, 04 Sep 2005 22:43:00 -0400, keith <krw@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>>On Sun, 04 Sep 2005 19:16:34 -0700, John Larkin wrote:

<snip>

>>> Yup. I do that, too. But I don't think that, on the whole, it takes
>>> time. The act of commenting is a sort of check in itself, and makes
>>> the code better, and reduces debug time. I hate debugging, so I code
>>> so that I have to do very little of it.
>>
>>It takes time. Whether that time is otherwise spent elsewhere is another
>>issue. I'm told that our programmer productivity on OS types of things
>>in on the order of one line per day. No, it' snot because there is only
>>80 characters typed per day, rather that every line is designed to fit in
>>the overall architecture (and documented with another fifty).
>>
>
> One line a day? Good grief. I heard the statistic of 10/day once, from
> IBM maybe, and it astounded me.

IIRC, one line per day was an IBM statistic for MVS development programmer
productivity, but that included the architects, designers, and support
people. That wasn't a "coder" productivity number. By the time the
"coders" got ahold of the specification the lines came out rather fast,
since all the decisions had been made.

I don't remember the numbers for the Shuttle OBS project, but it's in
that range too. One of the lead guys used to post such information on the
intranet years back but I can't remember the specifics. Maybe I can
search the archives.

> I average about 300-400, and I know
> guys, real programmers, who are faster and rarely make a mistake.

I know a guy who would crank out over 500 lines of working PL/I a day, but
it wasn't "production" code. I've touched that in assembler, I think, but
that wasn't working, tested code. Testing takes far longer than writing.
I couldn't keep up that productivity without my brain turning into
something resembling Bemelman, either.

I don't know how to measure "lines" in VHDL, but I cant get anywhere near
that even on a good day, unless one counts the entities, component
specifications, and port maps. ;-)

--
Keith
.

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