I remember when I was younger and was just learning about programming (turbo pascal), and reflected on the most complex program I wrote being about 150 lines. And then some guys started talking about how the operating system (windows) was made up of 100’s of thousands of lines of code, and then came hyperboles of how much a single programmer (bill gates) contributed to it. I think at that moment I lost interest in programming. I thought there couldn’t have been a place for me if there’s such a skill difference between me and the best in the field.

I always suspected that there were many programmers out there who struggle with mounting complexity. Its interesting to hear an insider comment on the widely differing talents within the programming community.

Greg Wilson had some sort of program to teach students what they’d need in order to contribute to open source projects. He’s left academia now, but he’s finishing up a book on open source architectures. Maybe his new book would help.

I agree that there are large differences between the complexity of programs of various sizes. Unfortunately, at least at my college, we never wrote programs over ~1000 lines of code, and thus were not really exposed to the sort of architectural decisions that you’d be forced to make in a larger project.

Fortunately I was on the school’s robotics team (http://robocup.bowdoin.edu/) and was exposed to a much larger code base (tens of thousands of lines of C++, Python, and Java), and was able to immerse myself in a project much closer to “real world” size.

How can universities encourage students to work on much larger projects? Should they offer credit for contributing to open source projects? e.g. extra credit if you can get a patch submitted to project X?

Johan: I recommend that every aspiring programmer read Code Complete for starters.

ConnGator: This post was picked up by Hacker News today. The extra traffic probably explains your 500 error.

It is very much not easy. The only way it worked was with very experienced developers, good management and a dedicated QA team.

BTW when I tried to post this comment I got this:

Error 500 – Internal server error
An internal server error has occured!
Please try again later.

I wonder how complex a 100k liner would be, biggest i’ve tackled so far is just around 30k.

I’ve read two of your posts regarding programming, this one obviously an the programming productivity vs pay article. Both were enjoyable and in my experience , entirely correct. The good programmers write fewer lines of better code. They also plan better solutions and understand the ramifications of those design decisions better that less capable programmers. I work with both, one is great fun to work with, the less capable is far less fun. We then spend too much rime correcting errors and tracking down bugs.

I’ve been programming for about 10 years now and alot of your logic seemed intrinsic to me. It made alot of my Computer Science classes extremely boring but it was pretty cool to learn different techniques to create more efficient code. I think your analysis.. well your paradigm effectively illustrates the gap that exists between small programs and large ones. I’m just putting the finishing touches on my web toolkit and your words are fresh in my ears.

I’ve written larger programs before but I went all out on this one. I’ve never done so much unit testing before and I’m starting to suspect that I’m paranoid. It’s so crazy how the implementation of some seemingly benign piece of code can complicate a project. The most important thing I’ve learnt however, is that shortcuts are to my detriment. Knowing exactly why certain systems create errors is more rewarding than patching it up.