The author partially acknowledges this later on, but lines of code is actually quite of useful metric. The only mistake is that people have it flipped. Lines of code are bad, and you should target fewer lines of code (except at the expense of other considerations). I regularly track LoC, because if it goes up more than I predicted, I probably did something wrong.
> Bill Gates compared measuring programming progress by lines of code to measuring aircraft building progress by weight
Aircraft weight is also a very useful metric - aircraft weight is also bad. But we do measure this!
> Bill Gates compared measuring programming progress by lines of code to measuring aircraft building progress by weight
Aircraft weight is also a very useful metric - aircraft weight is also bad. But we do measure this!