NegativeLinesOfCode

Last edit May 19, 2010

Seen on HowFastCanYouWriteCode and deserving a page of its own ...

: My preference - clearly communicated to developers - is for achieving a productivity level of negative lines of code. While maintaining functionality, this always fixes bugs. -- EricUlevik

I look forward to seeing the WikiGnomes attach this to other, relevant pages, because I'm interested in seeing them (the pages, not the gnomes)

A division of AppleComputer started having developers report LinesOfCode written as a ProductivityMetric. The guru, BillAtkinson, happened to be refactoring and tuning a graphics library at the time, and ended up with a six-fold speedup and a much smaller library. When asked to fill in the form, he wrote in NegativeLinesOfCode. Management got the point and stopped using those forms soon afterwards.

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt