Pervasive Code

Web App Autopsy has some juicy metrics such as the 100:10:1 ratio of anonymous visitors to free registered users to paying users. But they also have LOC counts which seem quite high, and which include things that rake:stats (a Rake task that’s part of Rails, which counts lines of source code and provides some basic analysis) doesn’t count. So, I hacked rake:stats to include them. Here’s what I did:
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I’ve been listening to the Ruby on Rails Podcast over the last month or so, starting with the first episode from way back in July 2005 and now I’m up to the March 10, 2006 episode with Bruce Tate. There’s a great section in this podcast where Bruce describes the immense amount of information that programmers have to learn in order to approach J2EE.
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I have encountered SOAP firsthand once (as opposed to reading about it) and I was kind of appalled at its ickiness. It looks like I’m not the only one; here’s an amusing post from a couple of months ago:

The S stands for Simple, by Pete Lacey.

To: pontin@nytimes.com

Regarding your article “Awaiting the Day When Everyone Writes Software”:

Your ignorance of the reality of software development would be excusable if not for the fact that your CV suggests that you should know better. Your defamatory description of programmers smears an entire industry of individuals with a single, pejorative stereotype.
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Joel Spolsky does a good job of describing why “there is no silver bullet” is true.