jeudi 6 novembre 2008

60 million lines of code vs 220,000 lines of code

"WIndows XP is "only an operating system" but has more than 60 million lines of code. Here is an
unfair comparison: Squeak is a late-bound dynamic OOP personal computing system in which its
OS, UI, development environments, and its many applications (including email, DTP, present ation,
network server, sound and movie lab, etc.) require only about 220,000 lines of code in total.
This is because there is some "dynamic math" as part of Squeak's metasystem and system that
allows some of the important relationships to be expressed more directly, simply and powerfully
than in most systems. There is so much more that could be done that what remains constitutes
an exciting edge of the art research project on its own. For example, the Squeak team is pretty
sure that the current 220,000 lines of code could be reduced to no more than 40,000, and there is
a good argument that the current system should take no more than 10,000. Such a re-rendering
of an entire system would be a tremendous accomplishment in higher level programming and
would greatly increase a programmer's leverage on new problems."

extrait de The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet
Grand Challenge: Make It Happen In The Best Possible Way

Alan Kay, Prix Turing et aussi Prix J.D. Warnier
http://www.cra.org/Activities/grand.challenges/kay.pdf

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