How Many Lines of Code Does it Take?

Eric Lyday By

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They say that coding is a language of sorts. A series of text files that ultimately are turned into 1's and 0's that make up a localized universe of whatever the coder intends. In this way I like to think about the programs and operating systems that we use everyday as books of sorts, and coders as the authors of these books. I know the book analogy is kind of pushing a bit far from the source, but for me it's a way to mentally picture how much typing, thought, and information goes into the operating systems of the technology of today.

I'm not a coder myself (so please correct me if I butcher this) but basically a line of code constitutes some sort of variable to be analyzed by a computer calculator. There can also be lines of logistical preferences – action words that give input as to what to do with these variables. Also there can be lines in which to comment on these previous iterations of code – this serves to help the coder remember what the heck all of these lines of code mean. Although I'm not sure if the statistics of this infographic pertain to comment code (most likely not), it is quite astounding just how many lines of code it takes to make some of these technological operations work. Facebook for instance has at least 15 times more code in it than a Large Haydron Collider does (pre debugging). I don't know about you, but that is kind of frightening and amazing at the same time.

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Eric Lyday

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