While this is a very interesting article, I think it would be great if people stopped using "How to do x in y lines of code" titles - it's just as bad as "x things about y" titles. It's a lot better when title actually describes what the article is really about.
It would be awesome if this was added to the FAQ or something.
Although I think they're overdone, I think "x in y lines" is avery relevant to the hacker community, while "x things about y" isn't always. Doing "x in y lines" generally implies an unusually elegant solution, that could be of great use.
It's such an easy metric to game, though ("The first line is 'import library_that_does_everything'") - It's a proxy for succinctness, at best.
That said, "[something non-trivial] in only 250-500 LOC" is often more interesting than "...in only 5 LOC", because generally anything that small is just gluing together libraries. There are exceptions, of course - I've seen impressive stuff in just a few lines of J/K/APL.
"How to do x in y lines of code", where x is a perceived to be something very difficult and y is a small number, encourages people to try things that they would be otherwise be too intimidated to try.
I'd usually agree with you. But, since this is about building filesystems, something I thought was reserved for kernel hackers and truckload of C, I think the LOC title is appropriate. I would have still clicked, but would have expected something way over my head.
Comments
While this is a very interesting article, I think it would be great if people stopped using "How to do x in y lines of code" titles - it's just as bad as "x things about y" titles. It's a lot better when title actually describes what the article is really about.
It would be awesome if this was added to the FAQ or something.
Although I think they're overdone, I think "x in y lines" is avery relevant to the hacker community, while "x things about y" isn't always. Doing "x in y lines" generally implies an unusually elegant solution, that could be of great use.
It's such an easy metric to game, though ("The first line is 'import library_that_does_everything'") - It's a proxy for succinctness, at best.
That said, "[something non-trivial] in only 250-500 LOC" is often more interesting than "...in only 5 LOC", because generally anything that small is just gluing together libraries. There are exceptions, of course - I've seen impressive stuff in just a few lines of J/K/APL.
In this case, the tool that he built (RouteFS) is actually a really clever abstraction above two other popular libraries (Routes and FUSE).
I agree it would be neat if he talked more about RouteFS itself, but it is a neat idea, and only about 200 lines.
"How to do x in y lines of code", where x is a perceived to be something very difficult and y is a small number, encourages people to try things that they would be otherwise be too intimidated to try.
I'd usually agree with you. But, since this is about building filesystems, something I thought was reserved for kernel hackers and truckload of C, I think the LOC title is appropriate. I would have still clicked, but would have expected something way over my head.