Under 500 lines!!!!!!1111one
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.
September 2nd, 2006 at 5:28pm
[…] I did check it out and I have to say that I’m impressed. It is using the rails edge and is trying out some of the RESTful stuff all the while adhering to the philosophies of CRUD. I have wanted to look into a good example of a rails project using REST, and this code base is great for that. What’s more is that it’s not very difficult to wrap your head around all of the code of the site, due to the small code base and nice abstraction of the code.While reading up on this new forum, I came across a post in which the writer was interested in Beast because of the marketing tag-line, written in under 500 lines. He goes on to raise some points on why that philosophy rubs him the wrong way, but I have different views on his points. […]