-2000 Lines Of Code An Article by Andy Hertzfeld www.folklore.org Bill Atkinson...who was by far the most important Lisa implementor, thought that lines of code was a silly measure of software productivity. He thought his goal was to write as small and fast a program as possible, and that the lines of code metric only encouraged writing sloppy, bloated, broken code. ...He was just putting the finishing touches on the optimization when it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2,000. I'm not sure how the managers reacted to that, but I do know that after a couple more weeks, they stopped asking Bill to fill out the form, and he gladly complied. The amount of work not done metricscodemanagementproductivity
Documents vs. decks Decks are easier to prepare than documents, however. Documents require coherence, thinking, sentences. But convenience in preparing decks harms the content and the audience. Optimizing presenter convenience is selfish, lazy, and worst of all, replaces thinking. Edward Tufte, Seeing With Fresh Eyes Ban PowerPointsStaff meetings at AmazonThe Cognitive Style of PowerPoint thinking