>> Maybe that's changed today. I remember seeing a figure of 11 >> debugged lines of code per day per programmer as the average for a >> GSA programmer back in the 1980s. > I remeber that statistic from my youth, too. What kind of code? > Fortran? APL? Cobol? Assember? C?
I think the language is less important than what the code is doing. I can scribble out hundreds of lines a day when it's boilerplate or just a mechanical transcription of a well-burnt-in algorithm, but can easily drop down to the single-digit range when I'm struggling with a difficult problem. Nor do I have any reason to think I'm unusual in any respect here. Indeed, what is my lines-per-day figure when I spend all day struggling with a bug and end up fixing it by replacing four lines by two? Minus two lines per day? Note that the preceding paragraphs are entirely independent of what language I am (putatively) writing in. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
