All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Matt's Rule

Matts on 2007-02-08T03:48:35

5 lines of code per 10 minutes is a good average.

That may seem crazy, but I'm talking averaging over a month or a year. And of course I'm talking Perl - for C multiply by 10 or 100. Plus some people code in their sleep so average over the entire 24 hour period.

Today was a good example. I wrote 3 lines of code the entire day because I spent the rest of the day looking up documentation and reading mailing list archives and working through problems in my head. So it puts my averages down. Other days I code more, or I wouldn't hit Matt's Rule.

NoCodMo

Yanick on 2007-02-09T14:47:50

Musing about the average # of lines per day makes me think of the NoWriMo. NoWriMo, standing for November Writing Month, is an world-wide event where writers get together and pledge to write 50,000 words in one month (guess which one?). There's no condition put on the quality of the work, mind you; the goal is just to provide a motivation to unclog the ol' production pipe.

In addition of the NoWriMo, there's the NoEdMo, which is for editing. Which makes me wonder if, next November, I shouldn't jump into the bandwagon and create a NoCodMo of some sort... A giant, month-long hack-a-thon. It has its appeal, in a nightmarish kind of way. :-)

Re:NoCodMo

perigrin on 2007-02-16T19:37:19

Actually I think that would be brilliant. Goal produce one functional non-trivial application in a month. Not a bloody framework, nor a quiet little module that someone might find useful(1), but a god-as-my-witness-user-interface-driven application. Choice of GUI is left to you, HTML, GTK, TK, Wx, Flash, who cares ... but build a full application in 30 days.

I would probably sign on and do something like that.

1) Not that you can't create these too in the process of building The App, but I'm finding that you'll never feed your children only writing meta-code.

Re:NoCodMo

Yanick on 2007-02-17T23:42:07

> Actually I think that would be brilliant.

My. Thank you. :-)

> Goal produce one functional non-trivial application in a month.

Yup, that could be a good goal. Actually, finding a goal (or set of goals)
that will attract and make sense for a large amount of people will
be the hard part. Building an application is already a good metric,
although a mite fuzzy. Lines of code, as commited to a repository, might
be another, but then we'll have to find a good target to reach -- which
will doubtlessly wildly vary in function of the used language. Some
serious thoughts will have to go into this.

> I would probably sign on and do something like that.

A potential follower, excellent! Well, check my blog here
from time to time. If I attempt anything, it'll be posted there.