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If you work 8 hours a day on Saturday and Sunday and each line has on average 40 characters, then on average you have to type about 5 characters a second to hit 7000 lines of code.

There's some heavy assumptions about boilerplate or autogenerated code going on in that estimate, as I don't think very many average 5 characters a second over 16 hours.



Haha, I appreciate the math, fair enough. We can change the caveat to "it's a project you worked on every weekend for a few months" if that helps. The point still stands that 15k LOC doesn't represent the type of codebases worked on by companies that employ multiple full-time software developers, much less long-lived enterprise codebases (which is Fowler's famed area of expertise, ironically).


The two assumptions that aren't quite right are the number of characters per line and the number of hours per day. For most work it's hard to spend more than four to six good hours per day just doing actual work; but when kicking tires on a hobby project, it is easily possible to stay engaged for an unhealthy amount of hours in a row.


I write 1000 lines of code per second, bud. It's called ctrl+c and ctrl+v. In all seriousness, with autocompletion, snippets, and AI, I don't think you can measure this accurately in the way you're doing it.


In English, the average word length is 5 characters. If you can type 60 WPM that means you're typing on average at least 300 characters per minute or at least 5 characters per second (at least because this is not counting the needed whitespace and punctuation). That makes it technically possible for a moderately capable typist to pull off 7000 lines in a day using your numbers. Pair that with IDEs and autocomplete and it becomes much more feasible, if you have a solid understanding of the objective for your code.


40 seems way too much. “}” alone probably makes up a significant portion of lines. Another thing is auto-complete that does the majority of typing anyway.




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