World: r3wp

I think lines of code is a pretty useless metric. Some lines are 
much more difficult to find than others.

and it is made less useful by the million different definitions of 
writing a line of code.

Graham: A good figure for you would be to count all the lines of 
code in Synapse-EMR and divide by the total number of hours you have 
spent working on it.

That's if the program you're comparing with is similar to the size 
and complexity of Synapse-EMR.

LOC: And what about code that you write, throw out and rewrite? LOC 
is not a useful productivity measuring method.

Much of the time is also spent on optimizing code = reducing code 
size.

If you start with 30 lines of code and end up with 10, that's still 
10 lines of production code ...

Yes.. and ? What does it tell you?

and tomorrow, that code may go away or be reduced to 3 lines, because 
you figured out an even better way to do it. LOC doesn't tell you 
anything.

Does it satisfy your need to have a simple answer? The answer to 
the question of which programmer is "better"?

Einstein must have been a really poor scientist, since his equations 
ended up being so small. :-)

I'd suggest that when you ask the question "How many lines of code 
a day do you produce on average?" and the respondent doesn't argue 
with you about the meaningless of the metric, that you should move 
on to someone else.

LOC is a bad measure of software productivity. As are most other 
alternative metrics, like, say function points:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_point_analysis

Quality of work (programming) might be measured by the amount of 
functionality divided by the amount of information produced to make 
this functionality.

So if you produce lots of LOC and get little functionality out of 
it, you're a bad programmer.

If you produce very little LOC and get lots of functionality out 
of it, you're a good programmer.

Readability probably play a role too, if the code has to be maintainable.

who cares bad or good the only goal is to do teh trick, satisfy the 
client and get the monney the rest is useless

judging coding since coding is an art is like judging painting .... 
can you say matis is better than Piccaso or Rambrant ?

what always amazed me in coding skills and in rebol most since i'm 
here to talk about rebol is the hability to do complexe thing the 
simpliest way possible

making complicated thing the complicated way is just loss of time

If you're going to measure KLOC, you have to measure it with historical 
data (e.g. the 100 lines that became 30 that became 10). And you 
have to account for design, testing, and domain understanding. Plus, 
do you have a well known target, or are you doing R&D?

Didn't Carl just post about a new metric?  http://www.rebol.net/wiki/Load_Mold_Sizes
 rebols don't count lines or semicolons, we loadmoldflatcompress.

such smaller indexers can be very good to learn and good basis if 
you need something more custom around data retrieval.. I was searching 
few times if there is anything like a text indexer written in REBOL 
but I only saw it today :)

Continuing a thread about Skimp and the Mailing List archive from 
the REBOLweek group...

We have 40K messages, but we index threads.....So only 9500 or so 
:-)

There is a skimp index per year. Each index has 27 files (header 
+ A, B,C etc). 
That's 400-odd files. Total 4.5 meg.

Not kept in memory....We're runnings a CGI application, so loaded 
afresh each time. (The opsys may be cacheing for us).

cool

skimp also indexes the ALtme archive on REBOL.org 100,000+ usually 
very small messages:
http://www.rebol.org/aga-groups-index.r?world=r3wp
There are some additional data structutes to handle that.

it could be great solution for those that make web-apps in rebol 
and such things would often benefit greatly from search, setting 
up lucene/solr is quite bulky for this task except they reeeealy 
need search

hm.. so you are saying skim runs as CGI .. so you don't need to run 
separate server ( and VPS access ) for it?

Absolutely. The startup code for skimp is:
   do %skimp.r

hm.. that is big plus .. .I implemented solr (that is restfull server 
/ indexer on top of lucene ) for 2 clients and having something that 
wouldn't require vps and all that would be much better

if I have any other requests like this I will think of using SKIM 
, maybe I will also be able to contribute a little in that case

Here's a very simple skimp session:
  1. start it
  2. create an index called %my-index and add two docs to it
  3. search %my-index for the word "words"

   do %skimp.r
   skimp/add-words %my-index "doc1" "these are the words in doc1"

   skimp/add-words %my-index "doc2" "and these are the words in doc2"
   probe skimp/find-words %my-index ["words"]


(In real life, it may be a little more complicated as you may want 
to set some config options).

does it already have some scoring implemented if you query for more 
than 1 word?

No. It simply records if the word is there or not.


You will see scoring if you search the Script Library -- so "relevant" 
scripts come first.
That's done by having more than one skimp index:
    --  header index
    -- comments index
    -- strings index
    -- etc

And then scoring according to how many of those indexes contained 
your search words:
   http://www.rebol.org/site-search.r

aha, cool .. then you can probably also simply make it so that for 
example header is 3x more important than comments etc... (like "boosting" 
in lucene)

Exactly -- we apply empirical weightings to get results that look 
good :-)

cool, then it's not so much less powerfull than solr .. at least 
how I used it.. I made custom stemming and synonimes outside of it 
anyway

No custom stemmings as yet. 


Butt the latest addition to the Library is Porter Stemming. That 
gives me some ideas about upgrading the Library's indexes:
http://www.rebol.org/view-script.r?script=porterstemming.r

I wouldn't build stemmer into search engine .. keep it slim :) .. 
In my case with solr I  process the docs before I index them and 
then I do the same to search queries .. it's all outside of solr..

Skimp already, in effect has a plugin: make-word-list. That defines 
what a "word" is.


One way to implement stemming would be to make stemming a plugin 
to make-word-list. But I have not really thought about that yet:

http://www.rebol.org/documentation.r?script=make-word-list.r

I needed a specific stemmer ... porter stemmer fits english well 
but not so my language and I needed to do a lot of synonims for specific 
field search was used in

For anyone that needs a backlink to their REBOL related pages of 
their website, I offer a REBOL links thread here http://www.tretbase.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=33

It does get scanned by Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other bots.

Good idea Paul.....

Another opportunity to present yourself to the world in a REBOL context 
is the members' pages at REBOL.org. Also highly friendly to Google 
and other search engines (No 1 in in Google for [I've tinkered with 
a lot of different languages] :-)
http://www.rebol.org/lmp-index.r

I need to look into that.  I think I only submitted one script to 
REBOL.org so far.

You do not have to be a script contributer to have a library member's 
page.

ah, slipping a little, now 'I've tinkered with a lot of different 
languages' is listed as the second page in Google!  ;-)

Google has many data centers, none quite synchronised. Results are 
semi reandom :-)

Anyone here have a patent and if so, where is your patent?  US, elsewhere, 
etc...    Also, what concerns did you have when you filed your patent 
or problems you faced?

Never did. Never will.