"How do you measure programmer productivity? When the Lisa team was pushing to finalize their software in 1982, project managers started requiring programmers to submit weekly forms reporting on the number of lines of code they had written. Bill Atkinson thought that was silly. For the week in which he had rewritten QuickDraw’s region calculation routines to be six times faster and 2000 lines shorter, he put “-2000″ on the form. After a few more weeks the managers stopped asking him to fill out the form, and he gladly complied."

And yet, this mentality still exists today.

Would you measure an MBA by the amount of email they've sent? Or an EE by the number of resisters they've used?

There was a clip on the documentary "triumph of the nerds" where Steve Balmer was complaining about working with IBM that they wanted KLOC (1000 Lines Of Codes). If we can make it faster and shorter we're penalized he rightly said.

When I started at Raytheon we had LOC (Lines of Code) reports, but it wasn't used much and disapeared. At one code review, someone pointed out a way to shorten and tighten up so code, and someone else chimed in, then it would be fewer lines...

I haven't seen that metric since.

Still proprietary, though, that's a shame.

Would it really kill Apple if by some extremely remote infinitesimal chance someone would find a commercial application for this?