Sunday, August 9, 2009

Who wrote the most successful lines of code in the world?

So, how do we measure the successfulness of lines of code? I think most of the people will think that this is a pretty hard question. A successful code should have the characteristics of great performance and good maintainability and of course do the thing it was meant to do, and only it, in the most simple way that is possible, but not simpler than this. I think that all those things indeed show the quality of code, but in my opinion something else should be considered as criteria for measuring successful code. I think the code has one propose in the world and it is to be EXECUTED as many times as possible. So if we could count the times of each execution of some piece of code we could effectively measure the successfulness of some given code.

So how can we know who is the man who wrote the most successful code in the world according to my definition of the EXECUTION? The answer to this i found in the this blog post. The post basically talks about the change that was in the scheduler mechanism in windows 7. For those who are not familiar with the term, this is the code that decides which process and which thread will be run by the processor according to priority and time sharing. So where is the connection?

The blog mentions a man called David Cutler who is "one of the world's greatest software engineers" according to the post. He indeed worked on many interesting things in his life but the most significant thing that i'm talking about is the windows scheduling mechanism. Yes Dave Cutler wrote the lines of code that run on each windows machine (version prior to windows 7 i guess) and decide what program to run next and for how much time... Just think about this.. These lines of code are running all over when we know that by now, windows is the most popular operating system in the world (by far i would say...) So if all my calculations are true, this code is by far the winner of the title "The Most Successful Code Ever Written" and this makes David Cutler the man who wrote the most successful lines of code in the world :)

Think about this.. if you find a piece of other code or program that takes the crown from my king (David) let me know :)

5 comments:

  1. I think there was some article somewhere about this some time back.
    The google home page JavaScript code line which positions cursor on the search field automatically.I don't know where that article was written but it argues that thata 1 line of code makes google billions.

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  2. Given the most used operating system on the planet is QNX and not Windows, the scheduler of it probably has more run times. You can find it from cars to microwave owens, happily just working. Those microprocessors have pretty low performance but their amount is simply higher.

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  3. I'd wager you'll find x100 times the number of ITRON installations than you will QNX installations.

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  4. My vote is for the one who wrote the lines of code for CTRL+ALT+DELETE.

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  5. I want to better understand the patterns that work and the patterns that don't work for successful code reviews.
    1. Should there be a difference be a Formal Code Review and an Informal Code Review?
    2. What level of documentation of the Code Review do people do?
    3. Can a Code Review be just as useful without the author of the code participating?

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