I remember the days when we talked about mythical man-months and why LoC was not a good metric to measure programmer output. And then Ken Thompson said [1]
> One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code.
Or the famous -2K LoC story:
> Bill Atkinson, the author of Quickdraw [...] had completely rewritten the region engine using a simpler, more general algorithm which, after some tweaking, made region operations almost six times faster. As a by-product, the rewrite also saved around 2,000 lines of code [...] 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: -2000. [2]
I remember the days when we talked about mythical man-months and why LoC was not a good metric to measure programmer output. And then Ken Thompson said [1]
> One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code.
Or the famous -2K LoC story:
> Bill Atkinson, the author of Quickdraw [...] had completely rewritten the region engine using a simpler, more general algorithm which, after some tweaking, made region operations almost six times faster. As a by-product, the rewrite also saved around 2,000 lines of code [...] 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: -2000. [2]
[1] disputed: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/43800/did-the-c...
[2] https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html