Marc Gear

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.

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