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-2000 Lines of code (2004)

529 points by xeonmc

by bironran

14 subcomments

One of my best commits was removing about 60K lines of code, a whole "server" (it was early 2000's) with that had to hold all of its state in memory and replacing them with about 5k of logic that was lightweight enough to piggyback into another service and had no in-memory state at all. That was pure a algorithmic win - figuring out that a specific guided subgraph isomorphism where the target was a tree (directed, non cyclic graph with a single root) was possible by a single walk through the origin (general) directed bi-graph while emitting vertices and edges to the output graph (tree) and maintaining only a small in-process peek-able stack of steps taken from the root that can affect the current generation step (not necessarily just parent path).
I still remember the behemoth of a commit that was "-60,000 (or similar) lines of code". Best commit I ever pushed.
Those were fun times. Hadn't done anything algorithmically impressive since.

by jfengel

7 subcomments

In college I worked for a company whose goal was to prove that their management techniques could get a bunch of freshman to write quality code.
They couldn't. I would go find the code that caused a bug, fix it and discover that the bug was still there. Because previous students had, rather than add a parameter to a function, would make a copy and slightly modify it.
I deleted about 3/4 of their code base (thousands of lines of Turbo Pascal) that fall.
Bonus: the customer was the Department of Energy, and the program managed nuclear material inventory. Sleep tight.

by dang

3 subcomments

Related. Others?
Negative 2000 Lines of Code (1982) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33483165 - Nov 2022 (167 comments)
-2000 Lines of Code - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26387179 - March 2021 (256 comments)
-2000 Lines of Code - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10734815 - Dec 2015 (131 comments)
-2000 lines of code - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7516671 - April 2014 (139 comments)
-2000 Lines Of Code - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4040082 - May 2012 (34 comments)
-2000 lines of code - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1545452 - July 2010 (50 comments)
-2000 Lines Of Code - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1114223 - Feb 2010 (39 comments)
-2000 Lines Of Code (metrics == bad) (1982) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1069066 - Jan 2010 (2 comments)
Note for anyone wondering: reposts are ok after a year or so (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).In addition to it being fun to revisit perennials sometimes (though not too often), this is also a way for newer cohorts to encounter the classics for the first time—an important function of this site!

by abraxas

5 subcomments

An old Dilbert cartoon had the pointy haired boss declare monetary rewards for every fixed bug in their product. Wally went back to his desk murmuring "today I'm going to code me a minivan!"

by dml2135

6 subcomments

I've become something of the guy that's the main code remover at my current job. Part of it is because I've been here the longest on the team, so I've got both the knowledge and the confidence to say a feature is dead and we can get rid of it. But also part of it is just being the one to go in and clean up things like release flags after they've gone live in prod.
I'm trying to socialize my team to get more in the habit of this, but it's been hard. It's not so much that I get pushback, it's just that tasks like "clean up the feature flag" get thrown into the tech debt pile. From my perspective, that's feature work, it just happens to take place after the feature goes live instead of before. But it's work that we committed to when we decided to build the feature, so no, you don't get to put it on the tech debt board like it was some unexpected issue that came up during development.
Curious to hear other perspectives here, I do worry that I'm a bit too dogmatic about this sometimes. Part of it maybe comes from working in shared art / maker spaces a lot in the past, where "clean up your shit" was rule #1, and I kind of see developers leaving unused code throughout the codebase for features they owned through the same lens.

by runfaster2000

0 subcomment

This is a good example[1] at 64k LOC removal. We removed built-in support for C# + WinRT interop on Windows and instead required users to use a source-generation tool (which is still the case today). This was a breaking change. We realized we had one chance to do this and took it.
[1] https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/36715/files

by conartist6

4 subcomments

I think of this story every time I see a statistic about how much LLMs have "increased the productivity" of a developer

by impostervt

2 subcomments

About 1.5 years ago I inherited a project with ~ 250,000 lines of code - in just the web UI (not counting back end).
The developer who wrote it was a smart guy, but he had never worked on any other JS project. All state was stored in the DOM in custom attributes, .addEventListeners EVERYWHERE... I joke that it was as if you took a monk, gave him a book about javascript, and then locked him in a cell for 10 years.
I started refactoring pieces into web components, and after about 6 months had removed 50k lines of code. Now knowing enough about the app, I started a complete rewrite. The rewrite is about 80% feature parity, and is around 17k lines of code (not counting libraries like Vue/pinia/etc).
So, soon, I shall have removed over 200,000 loc from the project. I feel like then I should retire as I will never top that.

by vodou

2 subcomments

A long time ago I was working in a big project where the PLs came up with the most horrible metric I've ever seen. They made a big handwritten list, visible for the whole team, where they marked for each individual developer how many bugs they had fixed and how many bugs they had caused.
I couldn't believe my eyes. I was working in my own project beside this team with the list, so thankfully I was left out of the whole disaster.
A guy I knew wasn't that lucky. I saw how he suffered from this harmful list. Then I told him a story about the Danish film director Lars von Trier I recently had heard. von Trier was going to be chosen to appear in a "canon" list of important Danish artists that the goverment was responsible for. He then made a short film where he took the Danish flag (red with a white cross) and cut out the white lines and stitched it together again, forming a red communist flag. von Trier was immediately made persona non grata and removed from the "canon".
Later that day my friend approached the bugs caused/fixed list, cut out his own line, taped it together and put it on the wall again. I never forget how a PL came in the room later, stood and gazed at the list for a long time before he realized what had happened. "Did you do this?" he asked my friend. "Yes", he answered. "Why?", said the PL. "I don't want to be part of that list", he answered. The next day the list was gone.
A dear memory of successful subversion.

by justtinker

1 subcomments

In the days when perl was the language of choice for the web I got a 97% reduction in code size. I was asked to join a late project to speed it up. (Yes I know that has low success rate).
The lead dev was a hard core c programmer and had no perl experience before this job. He handed me a 200 line uncommented function that he wrote and was not working. It was a pattern matcher. I replaced it with 6 lines of commented perl with regex that was very readable (for a regex).
Since he had no idiomatic understanding of perl he did not accept it and complained to management. We had to bring in the local perl demigod to arbitrate(at 21 was half my age at the time, but smart as a whip). Ruled in my favor and the lead was pissed.

by mapmeld

0 subcomment

Before a recent annual performance review, I looked over my stats in the company monolith repo and found out I was net-negative on lines of code. That comes mostly from removing auto-generated API code and types (the company had moved to a new API and one of my projects was removing v1) but it was quite funny to think about going to work every day to erase code.

by jaydeegee

0 subcomment

In an old ops role we had a metric called ticket touches. One of my workmates had almost double of everyone else but only for that metric. We had a look and it was due to how he wrote notes in tickets instead of putting all his findings in a comment he would do it incrementally as he went along. Neither of these ways were wrong it just inflated that stat for him.

by rottc0dd

0 subcomment

Hi,
I think I have mentioned this before in HN too. I am not from CS background and just learnt the trade as I was doing the job, I mean even the normal stuff.
We have a project that tries reify live objects into human readable form. Final representation is so complicated with lot of types and the initial representation is less complicated.
In order to make it readable, if there is any common or similar data nodes, we have to compare and try to combine them i.e. find places that can be made into methods and find the relevant arguments for all the calls (kind of).
Initial implementation did the transformation into the final form first, and then started the comparison. So, the comparison have to deal with all the different combinations of the types we have in final representation now, which made the whole thing so complex and has been maintained by generation of engineers that nobody had clear idea how it was working.
Then, I read about hashmap implementation later (yep, I am that dumb) and it was a revelation. So, we did following things:
1. We created a hash for skeleton that has to remain the same through all the set of comparisons and transformation of the "common nodes", (it can be considered as something similar to methods or arguments) and doing the comparison for nodes with matching skeletal hashes and
2. created a separate layer that does the comparison and creating common nodes on initial primitive form and then doing the transformation as the second layer (so you don't have to deal with all types in final representation) and
3. Don't type. Yes. Data is simplest abstraction and if your logic can made into data or some properties, please do yourself a favor and make them so. We found lot of places, where weird class hierarchies can be converted into data properties.
Basically, it is a dumb multi pass decompiler.
That did not just speed up the process, but resulted in much more readable and understandable abstractions and code. I do not know, if this is widely useful but it helped in one project. There is no silver bullet, but types were actual problem for us and so we solved it this way.

by tregoning

1 subcomments

There are still companies asking for # of lines of code written https://x.com/tregoning/status/1286329086176976896

by kunley

1 subcomments

"Every line of code not written is a correct one".
One of the early Ruby Koans, IIRC, circulated on comp.lang.ruby around 2002

by ivanjermakov

1 subcomments

Just today I commited a +0-2kLOC change, removing two months of my coworker's contribution, because it had to be rewritten. Best feeling ever.

by zkmon

0 subcomment

Great collection of stories! Thanks for sharing. I got carried away across the pages and relished the quotes page.
The ideals probably worked for that time and that place. Many places in other parts of the world and at other times, would have different ideals, to deal with different priorities at that time and place. America in the 80's had no survival struggle, wars, cultural stigmas, pandemics or famines. Literacy and business were blooming. Great minds and workers were lured with great promises. A natural result is accelerated innovation. Plenty of food and materials. Individualism, fun and luxury was the goal for most. The businesses delivered all of it. Personal computing was an exact fit for that business.

by Arch-TK

1 subcomments

I am currently working on a piece of code which I am actively trying to simplify and make smaller. It's not a piece of code which has any business ever getting larger or having more features. The design is such that it is feature complete until a whole system redesign is required at which point the code would be itself wholesale replaced. So I am sitting here trying to codegolf the code down in complexity and size. It's not just important to keep it simple, it's also important to keep it small as this bit of code is, as part of this solution, going to be executed using python -c. All the while not taking the piss and making it unreadable (I can use a minifier for that).

by fathomdeez

0 subcomment

I am net negative in lines of code added to two different companies I've worked for. I wear that proudly.

by klntsky

4 subcomments

A more realistic end of the story would be that the form refused negative numbers so he had to put 0 and got fired.

by Ensorceled

0 subcomment

We had a VP recommend "lines of code" as part of performance system. I showed some CVS stats of some of our key developers; one of our best performers was at -20K lines of code over 5 years.

by rossant

3 subcomments

I think lines of code could be an interesting and valuable metric.
If the lower (negative) score, the better (given a fixed set of features).
“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Airman's Odyssey

by Xeoncross

1 subcomments

Would be really interesting if microservices were limited to a manageable amount of code. I wonder if technical leadership has ever guided their org devs that services shouldn't be more than ___ lines of code (excluding tests). Obviously, more services would mean more latency, but I'm pretty sure this one I'm working on now that is over 11k LOC (ignoring comments) could be replicated with a few bash commands.

by 6510

0 subcomment

I often have a mental picture of the thing I need, I start writing it, get a bit "stuck" on architecture and think I could be using a ready made library for this. I find one or a few of them, look at the code (which is obviously more generic) and realize it's many times as large as I thought the entire project should be. With few exceptions the train of thought doesn't even reach the "Do I want to carry this around and baby sit it?" stage. Some how this continues to surprise me every time.
These 5 lines are probably my favorite example.
https://jsfiddle.net/gaby_de_wilde/c8bhcatj/7/

0 subcomment

by vendiddy

0 subcomment

One habit I've gotten into is trying to aim for negative LOC pull requests on occasion.
It has the added benefit that I'm forced to keep the codebase fresh in my mind.

by jarofgreen

0 subcomment

> I'm not sure how the managers reacted to that, but I do know that after a couple more weeks, they stopped asking Bill to fill out the form, and he gladly complied
It would be a much better story if they stopped asking everyone to fill out the form.

by kaoD

0 subcomment

Code is not an asset, it's a liability.

by Feathercrown

0 subcomment

I did this the other day in an old component that had been refactored several times. It's incredibly satisfying. IMO removing code is often more important than adding it because it helps so much with maintainability and future development speed.

by Scuds

5 subcomments

This being Lisa that's -2000 lines in 68k assembler. That's about as verbose as any real PL can ever get.
For what it's worth, here's quicksort in 5 lines of haskell https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7717691/why-is-the-minim...

0 subcomment

by dgan

0 subcomment

yesterday I deleted 2500 lines out of a project of 4300 lines lol.
I have mixed feelings because now it's so much simpler, but the frustration of having to write these lines in the first place, it's so annoying. that's what happens when specs aren't clear

by mindesc

0 subcomment

This is how you turn unwanted dependencies and inability to make string searches a virtue.

by kookamamie

2 subcomments

Lines of code is a byproduct, not the goal.
Code is an artifact, undesired debris.
The fewer lines, the better.

by charcircuit

0 subcomment

Just because lines of code is being reported it didn't mean that bigger automatically means better. It does tell a story about how one is spending their time though.

by bearjaws

5 subcomments

This is one of those stories that I am sure has happened, but when it comes to "and then they never asked him again le XD face" it's clearly just made up.

by awinter-py

0 subcomment

this must be paired with the '350k lines / then he discovered loops' post from the same site
https://folklore.org/Discovered_Loops.html

by jbverschoor

0 subcomment

Some theories will cause you have a negative performance review and will be fired haha

by strathmeyer

0 subcomment

A manager asking you to tell them how many lines of code you wrote is peak middle-management. Like what are you even doing, you count them.

by insane_dreamer

0 subcomment

When using Claude for production code in my core code base, I'm much more picky about _how_ it's written (as opposed to one-off or peripheral code that just needs to work). I find much of my work involves deleting Claude's code and simplifying its logic. (I'm still not sure I'm saving any time in the end vs writing such code from scratch.)

by LAC-Tech

1 subcomments

This just depresses me. So many programmers back then spent time optimising algorithms. Now it's slop city.

by Meneth

1 subcomments

NoScript link: https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html

by nickginger714

0 subcomment

[dead]

by BnnRGa

0 subcomment

[dead]

by daitangio

2 subcomments

Software metric are hard, indeed :) Be prepared in a ai-code world when more code does not mean better code.

by b0a04gl

0 subcomment

[flagged]

by victoriana758

0 subcomment

[dead]