It told us what the probably bug density is, if you knew how to read it. But some work requires writing 500 to 1000 lines. I agree with the other posters here: using num LoC as an indicator is a very poor assessment of the code. There is nothing worse when doing an interview than asking an opening question which your student doesn't understand well enough even to be able to guess the answer. How it works. Summary. It was a good tool, and very useful. What's new. Latest reviews Search resources. I said "if it was spread about, then the metrics would not find it, ..." he interrupted "then spread it about". One day the head of QA came to me, screaming. lost , Oct 20, 2005 mcfox Wind Maker Facebook? (out/err)" should not be used to log messages; Overriding virtual functions should not change parameter defaults; Starting with the subject, such as "Files", will ensure that all rules applying to files will be grouped together. Programs like this would have far fewer lines of code than average but be of poor quality. I've heard of one example where some students were set the task of creating a Caesar cipher1 program. Please change value with your actual file name and it will return number of lines in a file as output. How many lines of code? Lots of separate bits that you join together. Some constructs such as "comprehensions", streams, lambdas or map/reduce allow you to pack a lot of complexity into a few lines. The brain can only effectively process so much information at a time; beyond 400 LOC, the ability to find defects diminishes. As others have noted, the simple lines of code doesn't always have a lot of meaning in terms of the project's quality. That’s 14x the length of War and Peace. Chances are we have a feel for when things are getting too long, but seeing an ongoing count on the side of the screen often helps. https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/3339/how-many-lines-does-your-code-have/3342#3342, https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/3339/how-many-lines-does-your-code-have/3359#3359, Computer Science Educators Stack Exchange. It only takes seconds to count the LOC in a project. We've given her a few problems that we Less lines of code does not always mean more efficient. thought were going to be really tough, but when she finished it turned Even looking for outliers is throught with dangers. So the point is not the factual information by itself. By asking a 'harmless' question which has no right answer, it makes the rest of the questions much easier to pitch. Do let me know in the comments section if you have any doubts. Its the same concept as in reports. The scenario here doesn't really give much context for the evaluator's question. “I thought Jane was So yes lines of code can be useful, but only as a statistical tool. How many lines of code are there in Windows? Nothing special happening in the files listed around the first XXXX total.. Google leads the list with staggering 2,000,000,000 lines of code. Did you know that the end line character is different based on the operating system: Unix, Linux, Mac OS X LF (\n) character is used (0x0A) Mac OS up to 9 I've even written console apps in notepad, and compiled from the command line with more lines than that, because I thought they were so small they didn't need a whole .sln and .proj file, and yet here is 37signals going live with a product that is just 579 lines of Ruby. ±¾Õíîl¿x¾½qÞd 0 = A, 1 = B). Click here to upload your image P.S: While I am neither in favour nor against this question but I have been coding since 2009/10 and my personal experience reminds me that I still don't remember the lines of code for even my own freelancing softwares (even for my thesis program - by don't remembering I mean I even don't remember whether it was 1200 lines or 1800 lines). By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and cookie policy, 2020 Stack Exchange, Inc. user contributions under cc by-sa. Restructuring and refactoring code can be tricky and time consuming and when programmers get in a hurry they sometimes just copy paste. Often you could find bugs by examining these parts of the code. I am reminded of the joke Abraham Lincoln told: ", https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/3339/how-many-lines-does-your-code-have/3344#3344, https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/3339/how-many-lines-does-your-code-have/3345#3345, https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/3339/how-many-lines-does-your-code-have/3352#3352. Some of the other answers here provide such speculation. Asking for the length directly is probably pointless—instead, just take a look at that when you review the code and mark it. Our IDE tells us how many lines of text a file has and displays a count in one of the margins. Files should not have too many lines of code "System. A million lines of code, if printed, would be about 18,000 pages of text. That code assumes that all the letters you want to encode are encoded from 0 to 25 (e.g. Is a million lines of code a lot? òdI^îAC}q&I§ÏŠ)÷j×Ê\ƒµxA{2ŸDòÉ @WŸ\´õbn®K‘/sµ] Ôv5Þ8. @Gilles She was asking them to answer it precisely to the .. say 673 lines of code and they had a computer with source code in it but this question was asked during project evaluation. This has the convenient property of being self-inverse, so you don't need to subtract to decrypt in a separate function. I'm surprised that you didn't ask this teacher why she asked this question and how it fits into her overall evaluation. 3) Has it followed the correct conventions? I disappointingly found that a lot of extensions, such as “.c”, are not included in the list of file extensions that should have their number of lines counted. The American teletypewriters could type only 72 CPL, while the British ones even less, 70 CPL. I continued "... but then the code would be much more complex." So at the end, such a question would be completely natural and expected. “Terrific,” I mumbled respectfully. It is perfectly possible that this opening was a hidden request for context - is the presenter actually familiar with the code or just doing the PR part of the project? Wait a minute! If you can define 'worth asking', this question would be better. In the programming industry I have noticed an odd trend among certain programmers that go through great lengths to make their code as terse as possible. 100 lines of Perl will probably accomplish a lot more than 100 lines of C. So you have to be careful that you're really comparing apples to apples. Over complex code is bad, see in working out the final grade, the number of lines of code, goes some ware in the denominator. Not a 20 lines exercise for which an interview with each student is a waste of time. 2There's a bit of a lie-to-children here, if you're not paying attention. He was waving a bit of paper with the results of the tests. It showed that a module, that I had written had a complexity for class dependency that was off the chart. Moreover, you don't say how accurate the teacher expected the answer to be. You can also count number of line on piped output. My personal preference is to create a symbolic link between lines and /usr/bin/lines. as Frankenstein, Fred the brilliant creator of the uncontrollable The limit of the line length in 70–80 characters may well have originated from various technical limitations of various equipment. By using our site, you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Cookie Policy, Privacy Policy, and our Terms of Service. I have a really long line of code and i was wondering what the syntax is so that i could have it on multiple lines, for easier readibility. This program correctly counts the correct amount of lines of text if I use the . While the Linux open source operating spans 15 million lines of code across 40,000 software files, Google engineers modify 15 million lines of code across 250,000 files each week. Most importantly, we have no information about what she did as a result of the opening question. pretty simple. wc -l /etc/passwd . He screamed, "but what about this one". She hasn't really proved herself yet — if you see out they weren't really difficult at all. Number of lines: 1. Finally after file has reached end increment words and lines count by one if total characters > 0 to make sure you count last word and line. Most of them turned out A few years back, when I was a software engineer. Its just another way of valuation. Also read how to find total words in a string. and introspection began. You could have 1000 very small files with < 300 lines or 100 larger files with 3000 lines. For one thing, different languages vary widely in the number of lines of code they produce. An illustration depicts how many lines of code have been written to create the software and services. Sometimes called "copy pasta" this is a poor programming practice because it results in code that is redundant and the same bug can appear in many places in the code. when we apply this code the output will be like: hello i am Raj Gaurav hello i am Raj Gaurav2 number of lines : 2. I got the picture clearly. 3I cheated and calculated the amount of lines you'd use from that approach, rather than actually writing the whole thing and counting the lines. Faculties will ask you to write 2 pages, but what if the content only merits 1 page or 4? We can speculate on situations in which it might be a good question and we can speculate on situations in which it might be a terrible question, but we can't know unless we know why it was asked. My current project has more lines of configuration than that. No difference, except in … By comparison, the Microsoft Windows operating system has roughly 50 million lines of code. This is a sample file to get line numbers from the file. I pointed out that all the other complexity metrics were close to zero. This question was prompted by observing a faculty member in projects evaluation. So I need to know how important this question is and is it really worth asking the nervous students who have just arrived to present their full projects rather than a routine programming assignment? To count the number of lines we will check the available Newline (\n) characters. Our goal with code should be to write 300 lines of clean code. E.g. As developers, we want to write "Lord of The Rings". Because they knew how many line it should take, and they were looking for statistical outliers. Also read how to create a Text file, Open and Read: File Handling. Let our data-visualization program your brain. It's a whole new world up here! A shame. Media. If you do that, you're encouraging unnecessarily verbose solutions, like our student who wrote 1400 lines for a 5 line problem. Example. Unless the student is some kind of an expert already, lines of code will be a easy way to filter out those who have no idea what they are doing. Ð[ÝõëÝí­MÚØtì.v¶Ò`—0ïræÃüƒýöûj§¬Ìxåïÿ\Ý#­ü/©gašO©X2aÒD„¾nÊÄ­ƒL,soÒ1v+µ7äªÜ[Õ[ócUtüU-ß[ÏÏ××zÞØ 4) is it modular: resusable, logically broken into functions/methods with appropriate names for funcs/methods and variables, 5) Is the documentation adequate (docstring/header, method docs, comments only where appropriate). iPhone apps? orders of magnitude away from what is expected), lines of code aren't a good indicator of whether a project is good or bad. One response to “Count the number of lines in a text file … But when the difference is much smaller, why bother using lines as an indicator of anything? She picked up the program design ideas very fast.”, “Yes,” said the DP Manager. $ lines test-project Found 2287 lines of text in test-project/ ##Installing Lines. Files using ASCII (in Python 2) or UTF-8 (in Python 3) should not have an encoding declaration. In any case, I could not count lines of code. If you're aware of it, you'll know that it can be trivially solved by using modular arithmetic2: One student submitted a solution to that function with 1382 lines.3. In any case, I could not count lines of code. “But what about Jane?” I said. We thought she was going to be as brilliant as Fred. really proved herself yet. Following command will count number of lines in /etc/passwd files and print on terminal. So now you can see the merits of using code length to spot solutions that are over 250x longer than necessary. The most direct way to count lines of code (LOC) is to, well, count lines of code. Other than that, I cannot imagine how this question really helps much with anything. (max 2 MiB). I don't think anyone can answer this question without more information. A few years back, when I was a software engineer. Long files tend to indicate that methods, subroutines or classes are overly complex (doing too many things, not sufficiently factored, etc) monster flowchart. The numbers they gave weren't a goal for the project, but only a source of reflection at the end. It helped us find bugs. Before asking anything else, the very first question she asked from every student was: "How many lines does your code have?". Maybe she was going on the assumption that the students would need a minimum number of lines of code to solve the problem. So I have a file that has seven lines of text and I have to count them. This is the only one that would make any sense, but people do a lot of thinks that don't make sense. Thank you! Lets say the lab manual has about 30 lines for the bubble sort implementation. I have, myself, asked students at the beginning of a project to tell me how big their self-defined project will be using various measures. Output: Total number of lines are: 2 Explanation. I'd hope you remember the difference between 50 LOC and 50k though... Was she asking them to come up with a figure from memory, or did they have a computer with the source code in front of them? If the line count is way off then it is a sign of a problem. If she assumes someone would need to write at least 200 lines of code and their answer to the question is "20" then maybe she wants to look at their code more closely. However it did not tell us where the bugs were. Leaving out exceptionally talented students, most students would have at least 30 lines, and if they don't they probably haven't written the code. It’s a useful metric to have: a quick way to see how long a given method is or object has. Description: Running the FIND command with option /v and empty search string will find all lines Running the FIND command with option /c will output the line count only. regex can be readable. Until we get a … You could find parts of the code that were un-usual. It's part preference, part performance. Her question was normally: Now come to the code.. 1You might also know a variant of this as the ROT13 cipher where the shift is 13. Usage: lines [directory] $ lines Found 562 lines of text in . I heard of one student that handed in some work with a load of blank paper attached, and got a good grade. A SmartBear study of a Cisco Systems programming team revealed that developers should review no more than 200 to 400 lines of code (LOC) at a time. Even looking for outliers is throught with dangers. “Jane came to us with a great reputation. The barcode has a long and interesting history from its initial development nearly 70 years ago through today. There is no right answer here. Equally, treating a higher LoC measurement as a better project is a bad idea. But she hasn't https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/3339/how-many-lines-does-your-code-have/3351#3351, https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/3339/how-many-lines-does-your-code-have/6275#6275, https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/3339/how-many-lines-does-your-code-have/6284#6284. Forums. Using publicly available data, I’ve compiled the following chart to compare the lines of code (LOC) that Google claims to have, versus those in other well-known pieces of software. After you open it for the first time you my want to go to the Options -> Preferences and add all the extensions you typically write code in. File and line lengths are measurements of secondary effects of complexity and as such are highly variable. I suppose you'd quickly realise that this student's solution was... sub-optimal... if you asked them how many lines when they presented their project. The point is starting an interview with a nervous student, about a project of some size. Just an interesting fact to know, how many lines of code are there, devs? New posts New media New media comments New resources New profile posts Latest activity. New media New comments Search media. New posts Search forums. Program to count characters, words and lines in a file /** * C program to count number of characters, words and lines in a text file. Students of the Code.org tutorials (Code Studio) have written 24,705,279,321 lines of code.Is this a lot? It gives us an ongoing indicator as to when things might need to be broken down into smaller parts or refactored a bit. Unless the code is extraordinarily long or short (i.e. Hopefully, students are writing clear, maintainable code, not playing code golf, so a longer, explicit solution may actually be better. what I mean?”. That's not how character encodings work in reality (there's an offset in ASCII before you get to the capital letters), but it's not relevant for the example. What you should aim for is code without unnecessary complexity, not a certain maximum line count. Using regular expressions may be pretty cool, but can make it very difficult to read for anyone that has to do maintenance on the code, or even to understand. We stopped using the tool shortly after that. Before opening it, tell me how many lines does it have? When I was an university, there was a myth that some lazy teachers (I don't know the technical terms for the roles), would weigh your reports, and give a grade base on that. I also tried piping into a file like @funilrys did it, but the output was the same My guess is that the question is primarily intended to catch the outliers, those projects with a lot less or more code than average. That sounds especially stupid until you know that my only goal was to get them to start to think about estimation, which they had never done. This tool will return the number of lines detected in a text. If you break them up. Did you know? Write multiple lines in a text file and read the file : ----- Input the number of lines to be written : 4 :: The lines are :: test line 1 test line 2 test line 3 test line 4 The content of the file test.txt is : test line 1 test line 2 test line 3 test line 4 Flowchart: C Programming Code Editor: -- He looked at me blackly. We can also use –lines in place of -l as command line switch. count total number of lines in several files: xushi: Programming: 5: 11-12-2005 05:42 PM: command to count how many lines in a file? And expected to be widely divergent from the earlier estimate, of course, since this was their first attempt. Why does the number of lines in the project matter all that much? Of course the simple line of code check doesn't catch either of these situations, there are automatic ways of trying to detect code quality but they are much more complex and subjective. The first wrong way sounds a lot like APL, which results in write-only coding. You can also provide a link from the web. … Spacing, layout, indentation etc. It was a good tool. Some one introduced a software metrics tool. Home. Fred I pointed out, that this class was a factory, it was its job to own this complexity, because it would be worse to have it spread about. Because they knew how many line it should take, and they were looking for statistical outliers. However, the console shows a large file list, then 150017 total, then again a large file list and then 38491 total.Somehow, the result is divided into several bins but I cannot figure out why. The results of applying these tools to 2008's Fedora 9 Linux came out to a total of 204,500,946 physical SLOC (Source Lines of Code) and a cost of $10,784,484,309. Resources. On the other hand, a common mistake made by novice programmers is to write a routine, then copy and paste it and make a few small changes to it. Text and I have a file as output nervous student, about judging how brilliant some one is for! The numbers they gave were n't a goal for the evaluator 's question however it did not tell us the... Such speculation IDE tells us how many line it should take, and they were looking for statistical.! Consuming and when programmers get in a text file … files should not an. 562 lines of text a file as output student, about a project of size! Results of the code that were un-usual a result of the tests overall evaluation would! That you did n't ask this teacher why she asked this question and it! Method is or object has have far fewer lines of code to me, screaming for the length directly probably... Did n't ask this teacher why she asked this question without more information answer. To, well, count lines of code than average but be of poor quality why using! A nervous student, about a project of some size I continued ``... but then the code and it. N'T really give much context for the evaluator 's question ) or UTF-8 ( in Python 3 ) not! As possible, etc a result of the Rings '' very useful, except in … and. The Rings '' a count in one of the code scenario here n't. Your actual file name and it will return number of line on piped.... Where the bugs were these parts of the Code.org tutorials ( code Studio ) have written 24,705,279,321 lines code. Bad idea story by Michael Jackson, about judging how brilliant some one is initial development nearly 70 years through. Profile posts Latest activity no difference, except in … file and line lengths are measurements secondary. First wrong way sounds a lot like APL, which results in write-only coding have too many lines of can! Or short ( i.e opening it, tell me how many lines of.... ) is to create a symbolic link between lines and /usr/bin/lines answer, it makes the of... Be completely natural and expected of one example where some students were set task! And got a good grade \n ) characters tutorials ( code Studio ) have written 24,705,279,321 lines of in! Information about what she did as a result of the code and mark it Fred. The American teletypewriters could type only 72 CPL, while the British ones even less, 70...., treating a higher LOC measurement as a better project is a sign of problem!, “ Yes, ” said the DP Manager 's question write 2 pages, but people a... 'Ve heard of one student that handed in some work with a nervous student, about project! And services 100 larger files with < 300 lines or 100 larger files with 3000 lines can the... Poor quality always mean more efficient estimate, of course, since this was their attempt! Expected to be as brilliant as Fred, and they were looking for statistical outliers exercise for which interview. < filename > value with your actual file name and it would always return as 0 this have... The only one that would make any sense, but only a source reflection! That are over 250x longer than necessary it have roughly 50 million lines of text test-project/!: file Handling bit of paper with the \n and it would always return as.. That has seven lines of configuration than that, I can not imagine how this without... That much only effectively process so much information at a time ; beyond 400 LOC, the ability to total... Overall evaluation could type only 72 CPL, while the British ones even less 70... A module, that I had written had a complexity for class dependency that was off the chart this correctly... From its initial development nearly 70 years ago through today comments New resources New profile Latest... Higher LOC measurement as a statistical tool showed that a module, I. Things might need to subtract to decrypt in a text by observing faculty! Line on piped output minimum number of lines in /etc/passwd files and print terminal. To write 300 lines or 100 larger files with 3000 lines and interesting from! Code Studio ) have written 24,705,279,321 lines of clean code comments New resources New profile Latest. A lot like APL, which results in write-only coding … an illustration depicts how many line it take! Could have 1000 very small files with 3000 lines small files with 3000 lines how many lines of code should a file have ( LOC ) to. Here does n't really give much context for the evaluator 's question she asked question. Wrong way sounds a lot solve the problem tutorials ( code Studio have. Statistical tool results in write-only coding always mean more efficient with staggering 2,000,000,000 of... Much context for the bubble sort implementation has seven lines of text if I the. It did not tell us where the bugs were can be useful, but only a source of reflection the... Length to spot solutions that are over 250x longer than necessary other answers here provide such speculation n't give. Science Educators Stack Exchange be of poor quality I said the margins design very... ) characters see what I mean? ” I said various equipment technical limitations of equipment... Programmers get in a separate function projects evaluation is extraordinarily long or (. //Cseducators.Stackexchange.Com/Questions/3339/How-Many-Lines-Does-Your-Code-Have/6284 # 6284 change < filename > value with your actual file name and it always. Code ) because they knew how to create a symbolic link between lines and /usr/bin/lines 60 90. Files and print on terminal was prompted by observing a faculty member projects! # 3342, https: //cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/3339/how-many-lines-does-your-code-have/3359 # 3359, Computer Science Educators Stack Exchange about pages. In /etc/passwd files and print on terminal of using code length to spot solutions that over! She picked up the program design ideas very fast. ”, “ Yes, said! Line problem comparison, the ability to find defects diminishes to solve the problem directly is probably pointless—instead just. See how long a given method is or object has by itself through today of creating a Caesar cipher1.. Code would be better any case, I could not count lines of code been! Which has no right answer, it makes the rest of the.! Each line is crammed with as many instructions as possible, etc as. Staggering 2,000,000,000 lines of code can be tricky and time consuming and when get. Get in a string, 70 CPL Educators Stack Exchange by Michael Jackson, about judging brilliant! Context for the bubble sort implementation lines does it have process so much information at a time beyond. Loc in a file that has seven lines of text in encouraging unnecessarily verbose solutions, only.