Actually, here are a few interesting points from the RoR project page.
1. DHH seems to have written (or at least checked in) about 65% of the
code himself.
2. Ohloh estimates that RoR should require about 18 man-years of effort
to reproduce
So lets be conservative here and assume that DHH is responsible for 50%
of the effort on rails.
This means he personally has generated 9 man-years worth of code in the
two years since the repository was created.
So somehow one person has managed to do the work of 4-5 coders in a
single year. Do you suspect that might be because he drinks too much
coffee or because he uses Ruby?
Note: Even if these numbers are off by a bit, he's been very productive
compared to whatever standard they are using for determining how many
LOC can be produced in one man-year.
Thats not a good test, LOC... we all know it takes 10 lines of PHP for
1 Ruby line :-P. Seriously though, I had to edit a PHP application
recently, REALLY REALLY simple app. Could have been done with 2
controllers, 2 models, and about 6 Views, probably taking under 100
lines of Ruby. The application... was over 3500 LOC (the PHP code
only, no HTML), no joke.
I think Michael Houghton summed it up best: "Looking at all three graphs
together you can say that a relatively steady percentage of rails
developers is producing a disproportionate number of new projects in a
relatively programmer-efficient language, while a fluctuating percentage
of PHP developers are contributing more and more code to fewer projects
over time."
That's exactly my idea. What this shows is just the opposite "Rails
eats PHP's breakfast, lunch and dinner." The old viewpoint is that the
project is important, or complex, or (choose your adjective here)
depending on the number of lines of code. In reality, this hasn't been
a very good comparison for at least 15 or 20 years. The old 4GLs did
away with this comparison. I suspect it started with assembly or COBOL
and never grew past that.
The number of new projects in Ruby (Rails?) is exploding even though
the number of lines is not. To me this is the important graph. Who
cares about how many hours (and cups of coffee) you've put in? What I
care about is how good is the result, and how quickly can I create it.
So, rather than looking at this report as a downer, I see it as an
old-timer who just can't understand this new fangled music. And, btw,
I'm an old-timer too. I just don't want to work as hard as I have in
the past and that's what has brought me to Ruby and Rails.
