On2 vs libvp62 (was: Re: [Ffmpeg-devel] When is planned to add ogg Theora output in ffmpeg?)

[Dave Dodge]

On Sat, Apr 15, 2006 at 07:30:48PM +0100, Dieter wrote:
> High quality, well designed, documented, code with several 9s
> uptime: 10 lines / day
> 
> Code that core dumps left and right: 100 lines / day

Crazy data point: I once sustained something like 3000 lines/day for
several weeks.  I was however MUCH younger and more apt to just
write-discard-rewrite than to try to get things right the first time.
For example the application had an embedded Lisp interpreter and I
implemented three of them before I was happy with it.  It was all
pretty amazingly bug-free when I think back on it; most of the support
work was just tweaking it to get it to compile on yet another version
of Unix.  The worst bug I can recall was a very rare off-by-one error
that I spotted years later purely by accident.

These days I write much slower, and I can spend a lot of time thinking
about the code and making minor adjustments before I consider it
ready.  Also, at least half of the lines I write are comments.  So my
current project probably does average out to much less than 100 lines
per developer per day when you factor all of that in.

10 lines/day still sounds low, but I can believe that there are large
and/or complex applications for which that is the norm, if for no
other reason than the formal design processes they follow.  I once
worked on a project that required printed paperwork and approvals
before and after every change, and that one indeed moved very slowly.

                                                  -Dave Dodge