LOC (Lines Of Code)

1 Comment Published October 20th, 2008 in Java Tags: .

"skilled developers may be able to develop the same functionality with far less code"
--Wikipedia "Source Lines Of Code"

A very simple way to count Physical LOC (Lines Of Code) using Unix tools:

$ cd ${your project dir}
$ find -name "*.java" | xargs wc --lines

A general rule (not always true): the lower LOC is, the better the software is.

There are improved tools to calculate LOC, avoiding counting comments, braces, empty lines, etc. But I prefer self explanatory code over comments, avoid unnecessary braces, and unneeded empty lines.
See Spartan Programming (a nice article here); I agree on most of the principles, but with some exceptions (particularly about "minimizing variables names", that reduces code readability).

The only code without bugs is the code not written.

One Response to “LOC (Lines Of Code)”

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1 LeO Sep 15th, 2010 at 10:44

On some machines you need to invoke

find . -name “*.java”|xargs wc -l

resp. to have some ideas of the totals:

find . -name “*.java”|xargs wc -l|grep “total”