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Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 3, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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This is a really hard question, because not all lines of code are created equal. A line of Haskell or Scala can be far more dense than a line of say, FORTRAN, and God help all of us if we start talking about Perl.

The comment below about cyclomatic complexity is a good one, especially in conjunction with line count. Internally at work, we also talk about how compressible code is as a mostly-serious joke. It's actually not the worst rule of thumb. If your 3.4Mb of code compresses down to a 5kb zip file, you don't have 3.4Mb of code - you have 3.4Mb of copy/paste.

As an old guy, I've always held that every line of code is a liability. Every branch is a new set of tests that you have to write with a new set of expectations to figure out.