• and? (unregistered)

    This comment was autogenerated. <0>frist</0> <1>frist</1> <2>frist</2> <3>frist</3> <4>frist</4> <5>frist</5> <6>frist</6> <7>frist</7> <8>frist</8> <9>frist</9> <10>frist</10> <11>frist</11> <12>frist</12> <13>frist</13> <14>frist</14> <15>frist</15> <16>frist</16> <17>frist</17> <18>frist</18> <19>frist</19> <20>frist</20> <21>frist</21> <22>frist</22> <23>frist</23> <24>frist</24> <25>frist</25> <26>frist</26> <27>frist</27> <28>frist</28> <29>frist</29> <30>frist</30> <31>frist</31> <32>frist</32> <33>frist</33> <34>frist</34> <35>frist</35> <36>frist</36> <37>frist</37> <38>frist</38> <39>frist</39> <40>frist</40> <41>frist</41> <42>frist</42> <43>frist</43> <44>frist</44> <45>frist</45> <46>frist</46> <47>frist</47> <48>frist</48> <49>frist</49> <50>frist</50> <51>frist</51> <52>frist</52> <53>frist</53> <54>frist</54> <55>frist</55> <56>frist</56> <57>frist</57> <58>frist</58> <59>frist</59> <60>frist</60> <61>frist</61> <62>frist</62> <63>frist</63> <64>frist</64> <65>frist</65> <66>frist</66> <67>frist</67> <68>frist</68> <69>frist</69> <70>frist</70> <71>frist</71> <72>frist</72> <73>frist</73> <74>frist</74> <75>frist</75> <76>frist</76> <77>frist</77> <78>frist</78> <79>frist</79> <80>frist</80> <81>frist</81> <82>frist</82> <83>frist</83> <84>frist</84> <85>frist</85> <86>frist</86> <87>frist</87> <88>frist</88> <89>frist</89> <90>frist</90> <91>frist</91> <92>frist</92> <93>frist</93> <94>frist</94> <95>frist</95> <96>frist</96> <97>frist</97> <98>frist</98> <99>frist</99>

  • officemigrant (unregistered)

    Insufficient anonymization of the guilty party; a quick Google for the phrase "technical support for * was discontinued on" produces one result.

  • Mike5 (unregistered)

    But, if I go to their home page, I only see photos of happy people. I'm sure there was some deeper reason for their product discontinuation.

  • djingis1 (unregistered) in reply to officemigrant

    I got two results.

  • job (unregistered) in reply to djingis1

    Try "Write 10,000 Lines of Code in 10 minutes", that also works

  • MaxArt (unregistered)

    Well... a lot of boilerplate projects and app generators do that. The point is that you have to find good ones.

  • Karstibert (unregistered)

    I could have sworn to having read this before. Seems it was on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/programminghorror/comments/4zbxkx/more_lines_of_code_more_money_a_story_of_10000/

  • Anon (unregistered)

    http://www.ironspeed.com/products/Overview.aspx

  • Foo AKA Fooo (unregistered)

    At least a happy ending (in the bigger picture).

  • Ex-lurker (unregistered) in reply to Foo AKA Fooo

    A happy ending indeed. In fact, it even says so in their own website's "about us" page:

    A happy ending Our story has a happy ending. Not only did we develop a tool that saves you thousands of dollars and weeks of time, but we use Iron Speed Designer to manage our own business as well. We eat our own cooking! Our company, Iron Speed, Inc., runs entirely on “Nexus”, a suite of database-driven Web applications that handles thousands of transactions per month and contains millions of rows of data.

    The real litmus test is how many engineers we devote to building and enhancing our Nexus application: one! That’s all, just one engineer who works on Nexus part-time.

    It is so ironic I can't help but smile.

  • Stefan (unregistered)

    "I saved four months of application development time ... using Iron Speed Designer."

    — Chris Allen, Techno-Coat, Inc.

    Yeah, but your website is down.

  • Jared (unregistered)

    After finding the website, it concerns me with some of the brands that apparently have used this product...

  • Brian Boorman (google) in reply to Jared

    Like Wells Fargo?

    "Use Iron Speed Account Generator and open millions of accounts in no time!"

  • Brian Boorman (google) in reply to Stefan

    Um, how so? http://www.technocoat.com/index.php worked for me.

  • Kirk (unregistered)

    Here's some more information about why they shut down. They got hit by a patent troll claiming they violated a patent for developing web apps automatically based on database schema (which means that MANY tools are viciously violating this fine patent).

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/07/sunk_by_patent_troll_iron_speed_stops_ops/

  • Ozz (unregistered)

    Even quicker (in vim): Write 10,000 Lines of Code in 10 minutes!<esc>yy10000p

  • Foo AKA Fooo (unregistered) in reply to Ex-lurker

    "thousands of transactions per month" Wow! That's more than one per hour! Seems the one engineer could handle them manually just fine and still have time left to do his ... cooking ...

  • Noughmad (unregistered) in reply to Ozz

    $ yes | main.c

  • progger (unregistered) in reply to Kirk

    That's brutal!

  • Blug (unregistered) in reply to officemigrant

    Well, two now.

  • jgh (unregistered)

    I've just spent the last two days removing about 60% of the lines in one application, increasing its functionality and reducing its memory footprint by about 50%.

  • codemonkey (unregistered) in reply to Noughmad

    you probably mean yes > main.c ?

  • pif (unregistered)

    lines of code were obviously the best metric of effort and quality.

    That's what you get when you insist that "if it can't be measured it can't be managed".

  • jay (unregistered)

    I have fond memories of the time an employer said they were going to start evaluating programmers by counting the number of lines of code each programmer produced per day. When I was told this, I said, "Okay! I know how to score very high."

    For starters:

    x=x+4

    Don't be ridiculous.

    x=x+1
x=x+1
x=x+1
x=x+1

    Loops? Nonsense. If a block of code has to be executed ten times, then I make ten copies of it.

    Functions? Don't be ridiculous. We just cut and paste the code every place it's needed.

    Etc. I could think of dozens of ways to increase my lines of code count.

    Sadly, the company dropped the idea. There went my bonus.

  • jay (unregistered)

    Seriously, the problem I've always had with code generators in practice is this: (a) The code they generate is almost always clumsy, ugly, and difficult to maintain. (b) They can only deal with trivially easy cases. (c) In theory you can use the generated code as a base and add whatever complexity you need, but in practice once you do this, you can no longer make changes to the base data and re-run the generator, because then you'll wipe out all your customization.

    There's something to be said for taking the most mechanical and simple-minded tasks and automating them. That's what this business is all about, isn't it? And sometimes automating something in a mediocre way is better than not automating at all. A fine craftsman can produce a better better chair than the mass-production factory, he can make it prettier and more durable and so on. But the chair from the fine craftsman costs $1000 while the chair from the factory costs $20. Often the extra quality just isn't worth it. But often it is.

  • jay (unregistered) in reply to pif

    The catch -- in this and other cases -- is that counting lines of code is mostly measuring effort rather than results. It's like measuring progress on a project by how much money you've spent. It's a $10 million project and we've spent $5 million? Then we must be half done.

    I have fond memories of when I used to work for the government. There was one project team that got an award for producing the most forms and reports of any project team in the agency. Literally, I'm not saying that was what the award really meant or anything like that. The description of the award was that they had produced the most forms and reports. The never managed to produce working code. Well, they had a first draft, the software was supposed to support 20,000 users, but it crashed with 7 and they could never get past that. But they filled out all the forms correctly, and that's what matters.

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