[tt] a million lines of code

[Bryan Bishop]

On Monday 21 January 2008, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> A million lines of code is probably on the order of 20 million
> instructions, or 600 million bits. That's not far off of the 3
> billions base pairs in human DNA. Unlike DNA, which has redundancies
> and so-called "junk" sequences, every single bit in the code must be
> perfect. A single error causes greater or lesser failure.

DNA has the advantages of using various proteins to process the 
instructions and do interesting management tasks, not all of which we 
know of yet or have decyphered. But there are a growing number of tools 
for the processing of large volumes of code. There's the auto 
documenters (which never match an expert at documentation), there are 
even the compilers which export all of the information into object 
code, but that's not exactly a design-useful tool. While the fantasy 
for ages has been to get ai that can process the code in one big gulp, 
perhaps the reality that will emerge will be various tools and agents 
that can provide different explanations of the code to get a better 
grip on it all, esp. with heavily modularized java environments.

- Bryan
________________________________________
Bryan Bishop
http://heybryan.org/