50k lines considered very large?

Ola Bini considers 50K of lines as very large:

“I know several people who are responsible for quite large code bases written in Ruby and Python (very large code bases is 50K-100K lines of code in these languages).”

This explains a lot.

And the blog post made me think. We’ve written >50K code bases in Python in the 90s in a small development shop (<10 developers). I don't consider this “very large”. Large or very large starts for me at sizes when one developer cannot possibly know all the code (independently of the language) or cannot have a good overview.

As I see now that Ola Binis blog scrambled my comment, I repeat it here for reference

“The Maintenance myth”

[snip snip snip]

“Has there been any research done in this area?”

Nice blog post, if you cut out the middle. Interesting calling something a myth and then asking about research in the end.

“(very large code bases is 50K-100K lines of code in these languages).”

100K is very large? I wrote some projects in a two person team and reached 50K of lines. This is rather small. We did 50K Python programs in the 90s in a small development shop (<10 developers). Very large starts (for me) at 1M LOC.

(I don't like LOC as a metric though, FP or "Thought points" are much better because they are more comparable between languages and make more sense: A developer has to think about every "thought point" => more thought points = more complexity & more effort).

@Seo: “Codes written in dynamic languages tend to be shorter than codes written in static languages doing the same thing, and I think code size is the most important factor in maintenance.”

I don’t think Scala is much larger in LOC than Ruby.

And though Lisp & Haskell may have less LOC, they have a lot of Thought points because they have a high density of thought points whereas Java has a very low density with lots of noise in between.

Thanks for listening.

Update: Concerning my comment to Seo

An Ruby example

class Song
  def initialize(name, artist, duration)
    @name     = name
    @artist   = artist
    @duration = duration
  end

  def how_long
      "{@duration} minutes"
  end
end

or with idiomatic Scala

class Song(val name:String, val artist:String, val duration:Int) {
    def howLong = duration + " minutes"
}

or more similar to Ruby:

class Song(aName:String, aArtist:String, aDuration:Int) {
    val name = aName
    val artist = aArtist
    val duration = aDuration

    def howLong = duration + " minutes"
}

Another Update: Marcos suggested

class Song
  def initialize(name, artist, duration)
      @name, @artist, @duration = name, artist, duration
  end
  ...

as more idiomatic Ruby. Thanks.

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Filed under: Java, Python, Ruby