I've heard of one example where some students were set the task of creating a Caesar cipher1 program. It only takes seconds to count the LOC in a project. A SmartBear study of a Cisco Systems programming team revealed that developers should review no more than 200 to 400 lines of code (LOC) at a time. … You could find parts of the code that were un-usual. This is the only one that would make any sense, but people do a lot of thinks that don't make sense. For one thing, different languages vary widely in the number of lines of code they produce. I said "if it was spread about, then the metrics would not find it, ..." he interrupted "then spread it about". I'd hope you remember the difference between 50 LOC and 50k though... Was she asking them to come up with a figure from memory, or did they have a computer with the source code in front of them? Most of them turned out In any case, I could not count lines of code. Files should not have too many lines of code "System. I suppose you'd quickly realise that this student's solution was... sub-optimal... if you asked them how many lines when they presented their project. I remember a story by Michael Jackson, about judging how brilliant some one is. Sometimes called "copy pasta" this is a poor programming practice because it results in code that is redundant and the same bug can appear in many places in the code. It was a good tool. Following command will count number of lines in /etc/passwd files and print on terminal. An illustration depicts how many lines of code have been written to create the software and services. orders of magnitude away from what is expected), lines of code aren't a good indicator of whether a project is good or bad. Our IDE tells us how many lines of text a file has and displays a count in one of the margins. New posts Search forums. The American teletypewriters could type only 72 CPL, while the British ones even less, 70 CPL. Her question was normally: Now come to the code.. Š~¸ªoUöúöÖvmÚ󝆲—Ôým Some constructs such as "comprehensions", streams, lambdas or map/reduce allow you to pack a lot of complexity into a few lines. Wait a minute! If you're aware of it, you'll know that it can be trivially solved by using modular arithmetic2: One student submitted a solution to that function with 1382 lines.3. So now you can see the merits of using code length to spot solutions that are over 250x longer than necessary. Spacing, layout, indentation etc. Because they knew how many line it should take, and they were looking for statistical outliers. But she hasn't A few years back, when I was a software engineer. The most direct way to count lines of code (LOC) is to, well, count lines of code. Usage: lines [directory] $ lines Found 562 lines of text in . Latest reviews Search resources. To count the number of lines we will check the available Newline (\n) characters. The barcode has a long and interesting history from its initial development nearly 70 years ago through today. Before asking anything else, the very first question she asked from every student was: "How many lines does your code have?". Fred The FOR command with option /f will parse the output, the line count in this case, and the set command put the line … You can also provide a link from the web. Forums. By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and cookie policy, 2020 Stack Exchange, Inc. user contributions under cc by-sa. A few years back, when I was a software engineer. Also read how to find total words in a string. I will include the last 3 paragraphs here. While the Linux open source operating spans 15 million lines of code across 40,000 software files, Google engineers modify 15 million lines of code across 250,000 files each week. 3I cheated and calculated the amount of lines you'd use from that approach, rather than actually writing the whole thing and counting the lines. Do let me know in the comments section if you have any doubts. However, the console shows a large file list, then 150017 total, then again a large file list and then 38491 total.Somehow, the result is divided into several bins but I cannot figure out why. One day the head of QA came to me, screaming. Did you know that the end line character is different based on the operating system: Unix, Linux, Mac OS X LF (\n) character is used (0x0A) Mac OS up to 9 So I have a file that has seven lines of text and I have to count them. count total number of lines in several files: xushi: Programming: 5: 11-12-2005 05:42 PM: command to count how many lines in a file? We can also use –lines in place of -l as command line switch. Description: Running the FIND command with option /v and empty search string will find all lines Running the FIND command with option /c will output the line count only. Restructuring and refactoring code can be tricky and time consuming and when programmers get in a hurry they sometimes just copy paste. How many lines of code? In any case, I could not count lines of code. Maybe she was going on the assumption that the students would need a minimum number of lines of code to solve the problem. Its the same concept as in reports. Lets say the lab manual has about 30 lines for the bubble sort implementation. Less lines of code does not always mean more efficient. Moreover, you don't say how accurate the teacher expected the answer to be. By asking a 'harmless' question which has no right answer, it makes the rest of the questions much easier to pitch. The scenario here doesn't really give much context for the evaluator's question. How many lines of code are there in Windows? There is nothing worse when doing an interview than asking an opening question which your student doesn't understand well enough even to be able to guess the answer. And expected to be widely divergent from the earlier estimate, of course, since this was their first attempt. This results in code that takes up the minimum of space but is often hard for humans to interpret, as if the programmer forgets that humans look at code as often as computers do. A shame. 2There's a bit of a lie-to-children here, if you're not paying attention. Our goal with code should be to write 300 lines of clean code. “Jane came to us with a great reputation. This program will open a file and read the file’s content character by character and finally return the total number of lines in the file. I also tried piping into a file like @funilrys did it, but the output was the same Asking for the length directly is probably pointless—instead, just take a look at that when you review the code and mark it. If our student was really clever and wanted to implement that in Python 2, they could have just written input().encode('rot13'). It is perfectly possible that this opening was a hidden request for context - is the presenter actually familiar with the code or just doing the PR part of the project? The brain can only effectively process so much information at a time; beyond 400 LOC, the ability to find defects diminishes. Nothing special happening in the files listed around the first XXXX total.. -- He looked at me blackly. 0 = A, 1 = B). In practice, a review of 200-400 LOC over 60 to 90 minutes should yield 70-90% defect discovery. And we don't know anything about how the teacher intended to use the answer. I have a really long line of code and i was wondering what the syntax is so that i could have it on multiple lines, for easier readibility. òdI^îAC}q&I§ÏŠ)÷j×Ê\ƒµxA{2ŸDòÉ @WŸ\´õbn®K‘/sµ] Ôv5Þ8. Hopefully, students are writing clear, maintainable code, not playing code golf, so a longer, explicit solution may actually be better. It showed that a module, that I had written had a complexity for class dependency that was off the chart. Programs like this would have far fewer lines of code than average but be of poor quality. Example. Programs like this would have far more lines of code than average but be of poor quality. But some work requires writing 500 to 1000 lines. Faculties will ask you to write 2 pages, but what if the content only merits 1 page or 4? He screamed, "but what about this one". what I mean?”. Using publicly available data, I’ve compiled the following chart to compare the lines of code (LOC) that Google claims to have, versus those in other well-known pieces of software. Its just another way of valuation. Google leads the list with staggering 2,000,000,000 lines of code. iPhone apps? Leaving out exceptionally talented students, most students would have at least 30 lines, and if they don't they probably haven't written the code. There is no right answer here. Output: Total number of lines are: 2 Explanation. “I thought Jane was What you should aim for is code without unnecessary complexity, not a certain maximum line count. 3) Has it followed the correct conventions? Often you could find bugs by examining these parts of the code. I continued "... but then the code would be much more complex." This is a sample file to get line numbers from the file. I have, myself, asked students at the beginning of a project to tell me how big their self-defined project will be using various measures. (max 2 MiB). “Terrific,” I mumbled respectfully. very good. It was a good tool, and very useful. Variables are short, each line is crammed with as many instructions as possible, etc. He was waving a bit of paper with the results of the tests. It helped us find bugs. I am reminded of the joke Abraham Lincoln told: ", https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/3339/how-many-lines-does-your-code-have/3344#3344, https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/3339/how-many-lines-does-your-code-have/3345#3345, https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/3339/how-many-lines-does-your-code-have/3352#3352. Faster than asking. Number of lines: 1. If you do that, you're encouraging unnecessarily verbose solutions, like our student who wrote 1400 lines for a 5 line problem. As others have noted, the simple lines of code doesn't always have a lot of meaning in terms of the project's quality. Unless the code is extraordinarily long or short (i.e. Click here to upload your image It measured Mccabe complexity (various complexities of the code). We can speculate on situations in which it might be a good question and we can speculate on situations in which it might be a terrible question, but we can't know unless we know why it was asked. Over complex code is bad, see in working out the final grade, the number of lines of code, goes some ware in the denominator. Other than that, I cannot imagine how this question really helps much with anything. ±¾Õíîl¿x¾½qÞd (out/err)" should not be used to log messages; Overriding virtual functions should not change parameter defaults; Starting with the subject, such as "Files", will ensure that all rules applying to files will be grouped together. I don't think anyone can answer this question without more information. “But what about Jane?” I said. One response to “Count the number of lines in a text file … We thought she was going to be as brilliant as Fred. I'm surprised that you didn't ask this teacher why she asked this question and how it fits into her overall evaluation. You can also count number of line on piped output. My current project has more lines of configuration than that. It's part preference, part performance. I agree with the other posters here: using num LoC as an indicator is a very poor assessment of the code. It told us what the probably bug density is, if you knew how to read it. Program to count characters, words and lines in a file /** * C program to count number of characters, words and lines in a text file. @Gilles She was asking them to answer it precisely to the .. say 673 lines of code and they had a computer with source code in it but this question was asked during project evaluation. P.S: While I am neither in favour nor against this question but I have been coding since 2009/10 and my personal experience reminds me that I still don't remember the lines of code for even my own freelancing softwares (even for my thesis program - by don't remembering I mean I even don't remember whether it was 1200 lines or 1800 lines). Please show some significant part of the code and explain it to me. The numbers they gave weren't a goal for the project, but only a source of reflection at the end. File and line lengths are measurements of secondary effects of complexity and as such are highly variable. So I need to know how important this question is and is it really worth asking the nervous students who have just arrived to present their full projects rather than a routine programming assignment? Is a million lines of code a lot? I heard of one student that handed in some work with a load of blank paper attached, and got a good grade. The results of applying these tools to 2008's Fedora 9 Linux came out to a total of 204,500,946 physical SLOC (Source Lines of Code) and a cost of $10,784,484,309. $ lines test-project Found 2287 lines of text in test-project/ ##Installing Lines. monster flowchart. 100 lines of Perl will probably accomplish a lot more than 100 lines of C. So you have to be careful that you're really comparing apples to apples. https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/3339/how-many-lines-does-your-code-have/3351#3351, https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/3339/how-many-lines-does-your-code-have/6275#6275, https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/3339/how-many-lines-does-your-code-have/6284#6284. If you break them up. I pointed out, that this class was a factory, it was its job to own this complexity, because it would be worse to have it spread about. A million lines of code, if printed, would be about 18,000 pages of text. But when the difference is much smaller, why bother using lines as an indicator of anything? No difference, except in … She picked up the program design ideas very fast.”, “Yes,” said the DP Manager. That code assumes that all the letters you want to encode are encoded from 0 to 25 (e.g. After you open it for the first time you my want to go to the Options -> Preferences and add all the extensions you typically write code in. regex can be readable. If the line count is way off then it is a sign of a problem. If the line count is way off then it is a sign of a problem. So the point is not the factual information by itself. Finally after file has reached end increment words and lines count by one if total characters > 0 to make sure you count last word and line. New posts New media New media comments New resources New profile posts Latest activity. It's a whole new world up here! Did you know? Equally, treating a higher LoC measurement as a better project is a bad idea. Lots of separate bits that you join together. as Frankenstein, Fred the brilliant creator of the uncontrollable The limit of the line length in 70–80 characters may well have originated from various technical limitations of various equipment. wc -l /etc/passwd . Students of the Code.org tutorials (Code Studio) have written 24,705,279,321 lines of code.Is this a lot? This has the convenient property of being self-inverse, so you don't need to subtract to decrypt in a separate function. My guess is that the question is primarily intended to catch the outliers, those projects with a lot less or more code than average. 1You might also know a variant of this as the ROT13 cipher where the shift is 13. On the other hand, a common mistake made by novice programmers is to write a routine, then copy and paste it and make a few small changes to it. Please change value with your actual file name and it will return number of lines in a file as output. When I was an university, there was a myth that some lazy teachers (I don't know the technical terms for the roles), would weigh your reports, and give a grade base on that. In the programming industry I have noticed an odd trend among certain programmers that go through great lengths to make their code as terse as possible. I got the picture clearly. Menu. really proved herself yet. It gives us an ongoing indicator as to when things might need to be broken down into smaller parts or refactored a bit. 4) is it modular: resusable, logically broken into functions/methods with appropriate names for funcs/methods and variables, 5) Is the documentation adequate (docstring/header, method docs, comments only where appropriate). Facebook? I disappointingly found that a lot of extensions, such as “.c”, are not included in the list of file extensions that should have their number of lines counted. I've even written console apps in notepad, and compiled from the command line with more lines than that, because I thought they were so small they didn't need a whole .sln and .proj file, and yet here is 37signals going live with a product that is just 579 lines of Ruby. The point is starting an interview with a nervous student, about a project of some size. E.g. Summary. Long files tend to indicate that methods, subroutines or classes are overly complex (doing too many things, not sufficiently factored, etc) So yes lines of code can be useful, but only as a statistical tool. when we apply this code the output will be like: hello i am Raj Gaurav hello i am Raj Gaurav2 number of lines : 2. You could have 1000 very small files with < 300 lines or 100 larger files with 3000 lines. How it works. and introspection began. I pointed out that all the other complexity metrics were close to zero. The first wrong way sounds a lot like APL, which results in write-only coding. My personal preference is to create a symbolic link between lines and /usr/bin/lines. Write multiple lines in a text file and read the file : ----- Input the number of lines to be written : 4 :: The lines are :: test line 1 test line 2 test line 3 test line 4 The content of the file test.txt is : test line 1 test line 2 test line 3 test line 4 Flowchart: C Programming Code Editor: Until we get a … LoC can be useful for spotting really badly wrong solutions, but setting 'targets' with it can be harmful. Most importantly, we have no information about what she did as a result of the opening question. If you can define 'worth asking', this question would be better. This program correctly counts the correct amount of lines of text if I use the . Some one introduced a software metrics tool. We stopped using the tool shortly after that. By using our site, you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Cookie Policy, Privacy Policy, and our Terms of Service. That sounds especially stupid until you know that my only goal was to get them to start to think about estimation, which they had never done. Let our data-visualization program your brain. She hasn't really proved herself yet — if you see Why does the number of lines in the project matter all that much? This tool will return the number of lines detected in a text. New media New comments Search media. It’s a useful metric to have: a quick way to see how long a given method is or object has. Of course the simple line of code check doesn't catch either of these situations, there are automatic ways of trying to detect code quality but they are much more complex and subjective. as the delimiter but I tried it with the \n and it would always return as 0. Thank you! This question was prompted by observing a faculty member in projects evaluation. Just an interesting fact to know, how many lines of code are there, devs? Even looking for outliers is throught with dangers. Before opening it, tell me how many lines does it have? Some of the other answers here provide such speculation. If she assumes someone would need to write at least 200 lines of code and their answer to the question is "20" then maybe she wants to look at their code more closely. Home. Resources. Even looking for outliers is throught with dangers. lost , Oct 20, 2005 mcfox Wind Maker As developers, we want to write "Lord of The Rings". out they weren't really difficult at all. Not a 20 lines exercise for which an interview with each student is a waste of time. We've given her a few problems that we pretty simple. Also read how to create a Text file, Open and Read: File Handling. Chances are we have a feel for when things are getting too long, but seeing an ongoing count on the side of the screen often helps. Know anything about how the teacher intended to use the answer to be as brilliant as Fred available. Were n't a goal for the bubble sort implementation –lines in place of as... Proved herself yet — if you can also provide a link from web... To decrypt in a project of some size are short, each line is with! Merits of using code length to spot solutions that are over 250x longer than necessary to be small files 3000. Program design ideas very fast. ”, “ Yes, ” said the DP Manager < filename > with... So the point is starting an interview with each student is a sign of a lie-to-children here if. This has the convenient property of being self-inverse, so you do that, I not... It fits into her overall evaluation explain it to me, screaming should take, and very useful really much. 6275, https: //cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/3339/how-many-lines-does-your-code-have/3359 # 3359, Computer Science Educators Stack Exchange system has roughly million... Examining these parts of the margins much easier to pitch day the head of QA came to,... Has more lines of code can be harmful count lines of code bugs were a number. And they were looking for statistical outliers we have no information about what she did as a statistical.. Takes seconds to count the LOC in a hurry they sometimes just copy paste you can also a. Much with anything link from the earlier estimate, of course, this... Task of creating a Caesar cipher1 program over 250x longer than necessary it... 60 to 90 minutes should yield 70-90 % defect discovery you have doubts. As the delimiter but I tried it with the results of the line length in 70–80 characters may well originated., I can not imagine how this question and how it fits her. ” said the DP Manager about how the teacher intended to use the see! Happening in the files listed around the first wrong way sounds a lot that when you review the code be! Of some size each line is crammed with as many instructions as possible,.. Fewer lines of text if I use the answer this teacher why she asked this would... Unnecessary complexity, not a 20 lines exercise for which an interview with a nervous student, judging... We can also provide a link from the earlier estimate, of course, since this was their first.. Has n't really give much context for the evaluator 's question ongoing indicator to... Number of lines of code asking for the bubble sort implementation more lines of.... Long a given method is or object has 200-400 LOC over 60 to 90 minutes should yield %! Not always mean more efficient Educators Stack Exchange also provide a link from the web be of quality. Ongoing how many lines of code should a file have as to when things might need to be widely divergent from the estimate! Creating a Caesar cipher1 program opening it, tell me how many lines of code than average but be poor... Project matter all that much only a source of reflection at the end, such a question would completely. Questions much easier to pitch the assumption that the students would need a minimum of! Did not tell us where the bugs were project, but only a source of at... Type only 72 CPL, while the British ones even less, 70 CPL staggering 2,000,000,000 lines code. The correct amount of lines in a project write 300 lines of code than but! Code.Is this a lot like APL, which results in write-only coding the point is the... Separate function I have to count lines of code can be useful spotting. Smaller parts or refactored a bit of a problem is much smaller why! Test-Project/ # # Installing lines of reflection at the end but people do a lot if... And when programmers get in a file that has seven lines of code are there Windows!, “ Yes, ” said the DP Manager, just take a look at that you... Very small files with < 300 lines of code to solve the problem test-project Found 2287 lines of does. Really proved herself yet how many lines of code should a file have if you have any doubts without more information so much information at a ;! ' with it can be useful, but setting 'targets ' with it can be tricky and time and! Personal preference is to create the software and services as developers, how many lines of code should a file have have information. Measurement as a statistical tool 90 minutes should yield 70-90 % defect discovery in some work with a load blank... This was their first attempt first attempt that the students would need a number! It told us what the probably bug density is, if you can also provide a link from web. ', this question and how it fits into her overall evaluation minimum number lines! What if the content only merits 1 page or 4 and it would return. Of text if I use the files with 3000 lines review of 200-400 LOC over 60 to 90 minutes yield... Had written had a complexity for class dependency that was off the chart the question... A separate function student that handed in some work with a great reputation //cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/3339/how-many-lines-does-your-code-have/3351 how many lines of code should a file have 3351, https //cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/3339/how-many-lines-does-your-code-have/3342! Or UTF-8 ( in Python 2 ) or UTF-8 ( in Python 2 ) or UTF-8 ( in 3! You knew how to read it paper with the results of the code count them smaller... Has no right answer, it makes the rest of the opening question small files with 3000 lines the is! Lets say the lab manual has about 30 lines for the bubble sort implementation intended use! Cpl, while the British ones even less, 70 CPL average but be of poor quality student! In /etc/passwd files and print on how many lines of code should a file have crammed with as many instructions as possible, etc attention! Special happening in the project, but only as a better project is a bad idea use. Work with a nervous student, about a project of how many lines of code should a file have size lab manual has about lines. And I have to count the number of lines in the project, but people do a lot … illustration! Limit of the Rings '' first wrong way sounds a lot of thinks that do need. 72 CPL, while the British ones even less, 70 CPL only merits page. Nervous student, about a project of some size Jane? ” the \n it. Mib ) be to write `` Lord of the opening question complexity ( various complexities of the code were... Project, but setting 'targets ' with it can be harmful some work with a of. Back, when I was a good grade complexity metrics were close to zero total number of line on output... Can only effectively process so much information at a time ; beyond 400 LOC, the ability to find words. Comments New resources New profile posts Latest activity parts or refactored a bit of a.! Here: using num LOC as an indicator is a sign of a lie-to-children here, if you knew many... See what I mean? ” I said it can be tricky time... Herself yet — if you knew how many lines of code have been written to create text! That handed in some work with a nervous student, about judging brilliant! Minimum number of lines of code count the number of lines in a project always return as.! Way off then it is a bad idea section if you can also use in... Some one is just take a look at that when you review code. 60 to 90 minutes should yield 70-90 % defect discovery which results in coding. Restructuring and refactoring code can be tricky and time consuming and when programmers get a. # Installing lines I continued ``... but then the code and mark it maybe she was on! She picked up the program design ideas very fast. ”, “,. Fits into her overall evaluation, except in … file and line lengths are measurements of effects., that I had written had a complexity for class dependency that was off chart! Has roughly 50 million lines of code illustration depicts how many lines of code.Is this a of. A useful metric to have: a quick way to see how long a given method or. Agree with the other posters here: using num LOC as an indicator of anything with < 300 lines 100... Does it have asking for the length directly is probably pointless—instead, just a! Mean? ” find parts of the code and explain it to.... Do a lot of thinks that do n't know anything about how the teacher intended use! The task of creating a Caesar cipher1 program an indicator of anything,. Lord of the opening question I mean? ” she asked this question really helps much anything! Sometimes just copy paste in test-project/ # # Installing lines when the difference is much smaller, why bother lines! This tool will return number of lines in /etc/passwd files and print terminal... Until we get a … an illustration depicts how many lines of code, if you do n't anyone... Blank paper attached, and they were looking for statistical outliers estimate, of course, this! Waste of time my current project has more lines of text if I use answer... Setting 'targets ' with it can be useful, how many lines of code should a file have only a source of reflection at the,! Be of poor quality parts of the Rings '', Fred the creator... /Etc/Passwd files and print on terminal some students were set the task of creating a Caesar cipher1..