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The Pulse: ‘Tokenmaxxing’ as a weird new trend (blog.pragmaticengineer.com)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 12 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I’m no developer, just so some casual scripting for my job, but lines of code being a performance metric is a hilarious notion. Like, the indicator of good code is that it’s efficiently written in a small number of lines. It’s similarly just as easy to waste tokens on nothing of value.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    I love this story:

    A division of AppleComputer started having developers report LinesOfCode written as a ProductivityMetric. The guru, BillAtkinson, happened to be refactoring and tuning a graphics library at the time, and ended up with a six-fold speedup and a much smaller library. When asked to fill in the form, he wrote in NegativeLinesOfCode. Management got the point and stopped using those forms soon afterwards.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    I wouldn't mind seeing lines of comments and external documentation as metrics. Perhaps as a ratio to functions or sections. I know, requiring it would just lead to crappy documentation, but that's typically better than none at all, and there's a lot of folks out there just too busy with their brilliance to write up what they just coded.

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