In February 1982, the managers on Apple’s Lisa team began asking each engineer to report how many lines of code (LOC) they had written that week.
That same week, Bill Atkinson rewrote the part of QuickDraw that calculated regions. His new version ran about 6x faster and was roughly 2000 lines shorter. In the box for lines of code, he wrote “-2000.” After a couple weeks of this, management stopped asking him to fill out the form.
The most celebrated achievement in the early history of measuring LOC was the deletion of code.
Fast-forward 44 years, we are making the same mistake with a new unit of measure.
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