How big can a Python program be?

[Peter Hickman]

vronskij at post.sk wrote:
> Peter Hickman <peter at semantico.com> wrote in message news:<412204d5$1$28243$afc38c87 at news.easynet.co.uk>...
>>Are you suggesting that a solo programmer wrote a multi million line C++ 
>>program? If not then what has this to do with 'How many lines can one handle?'
> 
> No way. This was just another question. One  programmer told me that
> he
> can roughly handle max 10 000 lines  in C language. I was curious
> about Python. I always hear that Python can be used on larger projects
> than e.j. PERL because it is Object Oriented and cleanly designed.
> What is a larger project? Mumbers revail more.

The problem is that some languages are much more verbose than others, thus a 100 
line python program might require 2,000 lines of C or 700 lines of C++ (I'm just 
making up numbers here). What then counts is the programmers ability to read the 
source and summarise (oh, that's just creating back orders if we are out of 
stock). The more verbose the language the more likely they will have a problem 
comprehending the intent of the code. Imagine trying to comprehend a C program 
against its assembly equivalent. C is easier to read than assembly and Python is 
easier to read than C.

I suppose languages have a conciseness metric but I would not know how to 
measure it. On the other hand APL is very short by just as hard to read.

Perl is used on some very large projects! The 75,000 lines I mentioned was Perl 
and I would not count that as a large project.

>>The application I am currently working on has 75,000 lines across some 600 
>>files. 
> 
> This is probably team work. It's helpful for me to know figures. When
> you start a project it is useful to know the limitations of a
> language. Visual Basic is reported to fail on larger projects.

It was created by a team for sure but when an upgrade or fix is required then 
only one programmer is looking at the whole of the code so they have to handle 
the entire codebase. A well designed codebase / object hierarchy helps here.

As to Basic, the non VB sort, I have worked on financial systems that were 
written in Vax Basic that were many 1,000s of lines long. The language is not 
the problem. With VB the problem is that you never really got to work with the 
code, the IDE was always in the way and the IDE only existed at the program 
level and not the project.