Steve Yegge (one of my favourite bloggers) recently posted about the maintenance problems exhibited by a large Java code base. I agree that software bloat is one of the biggest problems in our industry right now.
His proposed solution is to re-implement the 500,000 lines of Java code into 150,000 lines of a more concise language such as Ruby or JavaScript (ES4). This approach seems misguided to me because software complexity is not directly proportional to number of lines of code. The fact that 5 lines of Java can sometimes be compressed into 1 line of Ruby does not make the logic less complex or easier to maintain if they are essentially doing the same thing. In fact, I would argue that often 1 line of clever Ruby is actually less maintainable that 5 lines of Java because it requires a deeper understanding of what’s going on underneath the covers.
A good case study is Perl where developers seem to be a mind set of “how clever can I be” and write one liners that become indecipherable even by the author within days. You might be able to get away with this if you’re a gun developer working on your own but not if you’re working in an average team of average developers. I think Ruby has actually struck a nice balance between readability and conciseness and this is one of the reasons why its popularity has surged. Still, the thought of a 150,000 line Ruby code base scares me and would keep me up at night if it was left in the hands of average developers.
A code base with 1000 Java classes is just a complex as a code base with 1000 equivalent Ruby classes even if the number of lines per class is less. Reducing complexity and therefore increasing maintainability is all about applying good software engineering principles and frequent doses of my favourite refactoring — Delete.
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