Not just a productive programmer, but one who's working on the sorts of problems that involve just writing code nonstop. I've worked on projects where just deciding what lines to write would take half a day, so that sort of raw code output would've been outright impossible.

How is LOC a measure of productivity?

it's not the measure, but surely it's a measure?

It's a measure of something. The question is whether it's a measure of productivity, which begs the question, what is the definition of productivity?

It's a terrible measure, but all the rest are worse in some way.

LOC is a worse measure than "% of the product", where the product has a global impact?

How do you measure "% of the product"?

boilerplate

Now add the number of hours or days for testing and debugging those 500 lines of code and you get the true amount of time that it took to write 500 LOC. Otherwise I can also write a huge amount of lines of code in a day but pretty much none of it will work correctly, or even run, on the first try .