At IBM in the 1980s, typical productivity would be 1,000 debugged, shipped lines of code per year. That was the metric that they used for their median employee. Where as, when we were shipping Half Life 1, one employee, Yahn Bernier, was shipping 4,000 lines of code per day.- Gabe Newell
I remember downloading the source code for HL2 (via the official SDK) and somehow I counted the lines of code and the number of programmers and the number of days it took to program and my calculations came to about 1000 lines per day per programmer. But I thought I must've made a mistake somewhere.
To be generous to the grandparent if the problem you are working on is simple then it really is possible to churn out 1000 lines of crappy code a day. Why anyone would want to is another issue.
It's not so much the problem being simple, but more about it being a problem you have already solved. If you give me a blitter API and ask me to write a composited then yes, I can churn out the required quantity of code with ease each day. I know the problems, I know at least one solution, so I won't ever have to head up dead end alleys, stop and research options on the Internet, discover that I've chosen a really inefficient algorithm that requires a near complete rewrite to avoid, and so on. Ask me to patch an existing code base that I'm unfamiliar with to add a new option on a settings screen, and those 5 lines might take me two or more weeks to write, even though the task is simple.
