Janey,
I do get your point, really I do
. I know that OS X and Vista are completely different animals. However, like animals, you can still compare speed, size, how much they eat, intelligence and brain size. I'll repeat again, I'm not making judgements about which is best - that's already fairly clear (unless we compare market share of course... )
I know Vista is derived from NT but there are still many things about Vista which date back to DOS days such as the idea of drive letters and compatibility with 8.3 naming convention. Are you seriously saying that NT was a clean break from the 16-bit MS-DOS based Windows era? In the article by Dave Jewell which I mentioned earlier, he talks about the trade offs between the clean slate approach of NeXTStep and the commercially driven approach which Windows has followed.
Yes XP was more complex in many ways but the fact appears to remain that the LOC doubled which is still a lot of code to review, test and secure between adjacent releases.
I agree, comparing LOC to establish programmer productivity is misleading at best. I happen to be a software consultant with an engineering degree so I tend to "engineer" my code rather than "paint" it. This approach tends to be slow off the mark but makes up for it later in the project when everything often "just works".
Yes peer review will happen outside of the open source world but when it costs money it doesn't tend to happen as much. I know this first hand as I work for a commercial software house and I often need to do my refactoring in secret... There will also tend to be fewer pairs of eyes looking at closed source code which are less likely to spot problems.
In summary, I know that LOC isn't a reliable comparator between O/S's but that doesn't mean that this discussion hasn't been valuable - for me at least.
Thanks to all involved in this dicussion,
Craig.
I do get your point, really I do
. I know that OS X and Vista are completely different animals. However, like animals, you can still compare speed, size, how much they eat, intelligence and brain size. I'll repeat again, I'm not making judgements about which is best - that's already fairly clear (unless we compare market share of course... )I know Vista is derived from NT but there are still many things about Vista which date back to DOS days such as the idea of drive letters and compatibility with 8.3 naming convention. Are you seriously saying that NT was a clean break from the 16-bit MS-DOS based Windows era? In the article by Dave Jewell which I mentioned earlier, he talks about the trade offs between the clean slate approach of NeXTStep and the commercially driven approach which Windows has followed.
Yes XP was more complex in many ways but the fact appears to remain that the LOC doubled which is still a lot of code to review, test and secure between adjacent releases.
I agree, comparing LOC to establish programmer productivity is misleading at best. I happen to be a software consultant with an engineering degree so I tend to "engineer" my code rather than "paint" it. This approach tends to be slow off the mark but makes up for it later in the project when everything often "just works".
Yes peer review will happen outside of the open source world but when it costs money it doesn't tend to happen as much. I know this first hand as I work for a commercial software house and I often need to do my refactoring in secret... There will also tend to be fewer pairs of eyes looking at closed source code which are less likely to spot problems.
In summary, I know that LOC isn't a reliable comparator between O/S's but that doesn't mean that this discussion hasn't been valuable - for me at least.
Thanks to all involved in this dicussion,
Craig.