• glibg10b
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    11211 months ago

    You seem to like the lines-of-code metric. There are many lines of GNU code in a typical Linux distribution. You seem to suggest that (more LOC) == (more important). However, I submit to you that raw LOC numbers do not directly correlate with importance. I would suggest that clock cycles spent on code is a better metric. For example, if my system spends 90% of its time executing XFree86 code, XFree86 is probably the single most important collection of code on my system. Even if I loaded ten times as many lines of useless bloatware on my system and I never excuted that bloatware, it certainly isn’t more important code than XFree86. Obviously, this metric isn’t perfect either, but LOC really, really sucks. Please refrain from using it ever again in supporting any argument.

    • Rikudou_Sage
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      6311 months ago

      Can confirm it’s a shitty metric. I once saved the company I was working at few millions by changing one line of code. And it took 3 days to find it. And it was only 3 characters changed.

      • AggressivelyPassive
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        2711 months ago

        That’s the curse and blessing of our profession: efficiency of work is almost impossible to measure once you go beyond very simple code.

        You can feel like a hero for changing three characters and finally fixing that nasty, or you can feel like an absolute disgrace for needing days to find such a simple fix. Your manager employs the same duality of judgement

        • Rikudou_Sage
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          1511 months ago

          I feel like a hero in this particular case, it was a bug in a code that was written when I was still too young to even read. And no one knew how to run it. We didn’t have access to the pipelines so no one knew how to build it and how to run it. It was a very obscure hybrid of C and PHP. I basically had to be the compiler, I went line by line through the whole codebase, searching for the code path that caused the error. Sounds easy enough, right? Just CTRL+click in your IDE. Wouldn’t it be a shame if someone decided that function names should be constructed as a string using at least 20 levels of nesting where each layer adda something to the function name and then it’s finally called. TL;DR it was a very shitty code.

          • @[email protected]
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            911 months ago

            What the fuck. I’m so appalled I had to leave this useless comment to digitally stare with an agape mouth.

            • Rikudou_Sage
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              511 months ago

              To be fair, they said I’ll be dealing with legacy code from time to time during the interview.

    • @[email protected]
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      2111 months ago

      I wrote a program that does nothing but busy loop on all cores. stylist_trend/Linux is my favourite OS.

    • @starman
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      1111 months ago

      Then this: :(){ :|:& };: is most important code in existence.

      • @[email protected]
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        1411 months ago

        What you refer to as Linux, is actually called Forkbomb/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calli-[Process Killed]

    • monk
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      311 months ago

      No, he doesn’t. He suggests that there are Linux systems with no GNU code, like one I’m replying from, and whether “no” meant “no SLOC” or “no instructions spent executing” or “no packages” absolutely doesn’t matter.