Maintenance Nightmare
Bob Congdon, speaking about Steven Yegge's Tour de Babel post:
Note that Steve wrote this in 2004 which, based on Steve's estimate of expansion rate, means that Amazon may have over 100 million lines of C++ code by now. As a point of comparison, Notes/Domino R6.5 (a complex beast) was documented as containing just under 20 million lines of C/C++ code. Compare that to some other estimates of size such as Windows XP's 40 million lines of code. What exactly is in Amazon's 100 million lines of C++?
That's a brick wall being approached at a pretty high rate of speed, IMHO. Forget the language - 100 million lines of anything are simply incomprehensible.
Comments
100 Million Lines
[Patrick Logan] March 8, 2006 9:45:48.992
I suspect there are 100 million lines of code on the Internet but that's not incomprehensible because one does not have to look at many of them. 1/2 8^)
I am fairly serious about that comment because any organization over the last decade that has not built its software components to be replaced has screwed itself no matter what language those components are written in.
I thought those lessons were learned at least 15-20 years ago with the initial huge C++ projects. (I was part of the hugest.)