Crude quantitative measures are no good. For instance, the intro of OO techniques can increase functionality with sometimes a decrease in the number of lines of code. An example close to home for me was the change from EcoLab 3 to EcoLab 4. The number of lines halved, but functionality was increased maybe tenfold (**subjective measure warning**).
On Thu, Jul 20, 2006 at 12:22:20PM +0200, Carlos Gershenson wrote: > > I wouldn't be surprised if software development was actually > > exponential, however it is harder to measure improvement, and the > > improvement is not a smooth as hardware improvement. > > I guess that we would like to have a general measure of the growth of > software complexity, but I don't know if there is anything like that, > nor how easy would it be to develop... moreover to check... where > could we get the data of e.g. number of lines of code, or source code > size in Kb, of software for the last 20 years or so??? > > A rough and naive way would be to check e.g. the size in KB of the > installation files of a certain software, e.g. Linux, Windows, MS > Office, Corel Draw, AutoCAD... > (with Linux it's quite difficult, because a minimal version of it can > fit in a couple of floppies, all the rest are add-ons...) > > Best regards, > > Carlos Gershenson... > Centrum Leo Apostel, Vrije Universiteit Brussel > Krijgskundestraat 33. B-1160 Brussels, Belgium > http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~cgershen/ > > ?Tendencies tend to change...? > > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org -- *PS: A number of people ask me about the attachment to my email, which is of type "application/pgp-signature". Don't worry, it is not a virus. It is an electronic signature, that may be used to verify this email came from me if you have PGP or GPG installed. Otherwise, you may safely ignore this attachment. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 8308 3119 (mobile) Mathematics 0425 253119 (") UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Australia http://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks International prefix +612, Interstate prefix 02 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
