Dijkstra wrote that in 1988. Things change. The prevailing wisdom changes over time.
Is anybody really proudly counting lines of code at this late date? Is there anyone out there who doesn't love an all-red diff? Is there anyone who really thinks the prolix version of a function is better than the concise one, all else equal? Who is getting paid by line of code, or has to meet a a quota of LOC?
The hell it does. Dijkstra's words are as important, if not even more important than when they were first written. The whole problem is that we keep re-inventing the wheel and all associated problems over and over again. We never put the lessons learned the hard way to practice in the long run. New generation -> rinse, repeat.
I get that you have axes to grind, but that all doesn’t actually have anything to do with what I was talking about, which is essentially that nobody thinks “lots of lines of code” is a good thing anymore.
I work in a startup full of twentysomethings. None of them have read “Mythical Man Month” but they all know the bit about how adding engineers to a late project makes it later. It takes time, but these things find their way into the conventional wisdom.
It’s not 1988 anymore. Not everything changes, but some things do.
Or do you think we all still need to be reminded that “goto” is bad and we shouldn’t use it?
Consider that your personal experience is no match for what we have encountered in about 140 tech reviews of companies in various industries. I'm super happy to hear that you and your crew are clued in and doing well, and that this is all 'old hat' to you.
Even so, there are lots of other companies out there, some older, some newer, both large and small in regulated industries, e-commerce and so on who could very well use some of the common sense that pervades you and your team.
It's definitely not 1988 anymore. Contrary to popular wisdom the programmers from back then usually were clued in, rather than that they went to javascript bootcamp and started churning out reams of low quality code. Plenty of the software from back then is still around today. The Mythical Man Month writes about a team of reasonably competent professionals and the pitfalls they encounter, not about a bunch of clueless newbies.
That adding engineers to a late project makes it later is now an established fact, you would hope. And yet, not a month goes by without encountering exactly that proposition.
So yes, maybe we do need that periodical reminder that 'goto' is bad and that we shouldn't use it too, fortunately the number of languages that support that construct is dwindling, and in those cases where it is used it is hidden quite well without the nasty side effects that an uncontrolled jump into them middle of a bunch of conditionals could cause.
Is anybody really proudly counting lines of code at this late date? Is there anyone out there who doesn't love an all-red diff? Is there anyone who really thinks the prolix version of a function is better than the concise one, all else equal? Who is getting paid by line of code, or has to meet a a quota of LOC?