Autocoding project proposal.

[phil hunt]

On Wed, 06 Feb 2002 06:58:46 GMT, Courageous <jkraska at san.rr.com> wrote:
>
>>Figure it out already!!!!
>
>Has anyone happened to have seen the BCG research? One of their
>data ranked the what traits opens source developers value most
>in the project leader. The top trait was, at 48%, "makes significant
>early contribution to the code."
>
>Basically, you're not much of an open source software developer
>unless you walk into the announcement with a prototype that people
>can sink their teeth into. Hordes of people with ideas and little
>more than 1,000 LOC attention spans soon follow. As always, these
>efforts are brought to fruition off of a small group of dynamos
>who really know how to make their keyboards ring.

You can sometimes get a lot into 1000 LOC. Herbrip is currently
about 4000 LOC, but 1000 of that is the test suite. Of the rest,
about half is comments and blank lines. So Herbrip is about
1500 LOC of actual code. But some of the code in the main Herbrip
source is not executed (it's a library module) or is test code for
the module, or implements logging (which isn't necessary apart from
testing and debugging).

I bet I could write a working herbivore system in less than 1000 LOC,
if I wanted to. It wouldn't be pretty, mind. But it would testify
to Python being expressive: 1 Python LOC is about 5 C++ LOC or
3 Java LOC or 8 C LOC.


-- 
===== Philip Hunt ===== philh at comuno.freeserve.co.uk =====
Herbivore, a zero-effort email encryption system. Details at:
<http://www.vision25.demon.co.uk/oss/herbivore/intro.html>