The article is somewhat silly, but there's a kernel of good advice here -
To estimate the "complexity" of a codebase:
1. Remove all comments
2. Replace all spans of whitespace with a single space
3. Concatenate all source together into a single file
4. Compress the resulting text file using gzip -9 (or your favorite compression engine)
The size of the resulting file is a good proxy for overall complexity. It's not heavily affected by naming conventions, and a refactoring that reduces the number is probably good for overall complexity.
It's not a perfect metric as it doesn't include any notion of cyclomatic complexity, but it's a good start and useful to track over time.
To estimate the "complexity" of a codebase:
1. Remove all comments
2. Replace all spans of whitespace with a single space
3. Concatenate all source together into a single file
4. Compress the resulting text file using gzip -9 (or your favorite compression engine)
The size of the resulting file is a good proxy for overall complexity. It's not heavily affected by naming conventions, and a refactoring that reduces the number is probably good for overall complexity.
It's not a perfect metric as it doesn't include any notion of cyclomatic complexity, but it's a good start and useful to track over time.