Code Monkeyism

Remembering Tada-List in 579 lines of code - not impressed

Tada-List was written in 579 lines of Rails code. Jeff of Coding Horror writes “[...], I agree with Joseph: it’s an impressive achievement, [...]“. I’m not impressed. If you write a framework for a narrow group of applications, it should be easy to write a small target application with a few lines of code. And they don’t count HTML.Top this: a game written in ZERO lines of code.

Most code is hidden in the framework. Taking it to the extreme, with XL/R and concept programming I could write TaDa List in one line of code:

tada-list

The issue remains. It’s the same with encryption. There is a message and a key. How much information is in the key and the message? If the key is “Hello World” then the message can just be “1″. If the key is “1″ then the message needs to be “Hello World”. How much code is in the framework and the application?

That aside. My biggest achivement in small code size was a 1024 bytes (the boot sector size of an Amiga) boot selector menu with color bars. Impressive if you consider we had to put all the menu text into those 1024 bytes.