Maurits thinks aloud

I started programming in 1983 on a Sharp PC-1251 with an amazing 3486 bytes RAM. It had a Basic interpreter and we had to use it for a Calculus course at the university.

So that’s 25 years ago. That made me suddenly wonder how much code in different programming languages I have written in all those years. A completely useless question of course, but fun nevertheless. I don’t have all the code available anymore so I have to estimate some numbers from memory. The numbers I present include comment and blank lines.

The list:

1. C: 100.000
2. C#: 70.000
3. Java: 20.000
4. C++: 20.000
5. Pascal: 5.000
6. PV~Wave: 5.000
7. Basic: 2.000
8. Matlab: 1.000
9. Lisp/Scheme: 1.000
10. Assembly: 1.000
11. Fortran: 200
12. Perl: 100
13. Python: 20
14. Boo: 20
15. Nemerle: 20
16. F#: 20
17. Ruby: 10

This totals 225k lines of code in 25 years.In other words, about 10k LOC’s per year, or 30 lines per day. Other interesting questions that could be asked:

• how much of this code is still in use
• how much of this code is forever lost
• how much of this code is still archived somewhere on a company network
• how much code would this have been if it all had been written using language xyz
• how many bugs did I introduce over the last 25 years