[FRIAM] singularity

[Russell Standish]

Crude quantitative measures are no good. For instance, the intro of OO
techniques can increase functionality with sometimes a decrease in the
number of lines of code. An example close to home for me was the
change from EcoLab 3 to EcoLab 4. The number of lines halved, but
functionality was increased maybe tenfold (**subjective measure warning**).



On Thu, Jul 20, 2006 at 12:22:20PM +0200, Carlos Gershenson wrote:
> > I wouldn't be surprised if software development was actually
> > exponential, however it is harder to measure improvement, and the
> > improvement is not a smooth as hardware improvement.
> 
> I guess that we would like to have a general measure of the growth of  
> software complexity, but I don't know if there is anything like that,  
> nor how easy would it be to develop... moreover to check... where  
> could we get the data of e.g. number of lines of code, or source code  
> size in Kb, of software for the last 20 years or so???
> 
> A rough and naive way would be to check e.g. the size in KB of the  
> installation files of a certain software, e.g. Linux, Windows, MS  
> Office, Corel Draw, AutoCAD...
> (with Linux it's quite difficult, because a minimal version of it can  
> fit in a couple of floppies, all the rest are add-ons...)
> 
> Best regards,
> 
>      Carlos Gershenson...
>      Centrum Leo Apostel, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
>      Krijgskundestraat 33. B-1160 Brussels, Belgium
>      http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~cgershen/
> 
>    ?Tendencies tend to change...?
> 
> 
> 
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

-- 
*PS: A number of people ask me about the attachment to my email, which
is of type "application/pgp-signature". Don't worry, it is not a
virus. It is an electronic signature, that may be used to verify this
email came from me if you have PGP or GPG installed. Otherwise, you
may safely ignore this attachment.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
A/Prof Russell Standish                  Phone 8308 3119 (mobile)
Mathematics                         	       0425 253119 (")
UNSW SYDNEY 2052         	         R.Standish at unsw.edu.au             
Australia                                http://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks
            International prefix  +612, Interstate prefix 02
----------------------------------------------------------------------------