Saw this article about a forum in Rails. It all looks very pretty and everything.
The thing that caught my eye is the text ‘under 500 lines of code’, I brought the domain onekay.com with the original intention of writing publicly availiable code that did cool stuff, in under 1000 lines (onekay, 1K, geddit?). I changed my mind because of the following reasons:
- Obscure code
In order to get down to the required number of code, clarity can get thrown out of the window – nicely written commented blocks of code become horrendous one liners that cryptographers would have trouble deciphering.
- Included librarys
It doesn’t mean a thing if your script only has 500 lines, if it needs another 500k lines of code in its required class librarys/framework/whatever in order to execute.
- Arbitary restriction
Unless you’re intending to have your piece of software run on a coffee maker or a C64, the number of lines of code your software has, just doesn’t matter. It doesn’t make it any more portable, scalable, or useful.
- Feature loss
You’re not writing the best software you can when you attempt to write code with unnecessary restrictions in place – what features are you not implementing? What features are you implementing incompletly?
While I am sure that Beast is clever, well written software, and not all of the above apply here but ‘Under 500 lines of code’ is a gimmicky marketing ploy that seems to work every time.
