(fwd) article on open source

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

Robert L Krawitz <rlk at alum.mit.edu> writes:
	 Lines of code are a useful zeroth-order approach to estimating
	 complexity and how much effort will be required to support something.
	 Even accounting for differences in style, a 50KLOC program almost
	 always will be faster to develop and easier to maintain than a 500KLOC
	 program in the same language and in the same field of endeavor.

Hmmm ...  My code is usually about 50% comments.  The above
would  imply  that  I can make my code half as difficult to
understand and maintain by stripping out all the comments.

Are you sure this is the lesson you want me to learn?

Of course, many of the management tools that  measure  code
do  ignore such non-code things as comments.  So it may not
be necessary to strip out the comments. The tools will take
care  of  it  for you, and nobody will ever notice that you
included such irrelevant stuff.

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