I’ve been thinking of a code metric designed to measure how much code
it takes any given language to write a program that does nothing. Don’t
misunderstand me and think that I mean a Hello World
program with 64K exclamation points tacked onto the end. What I mean is
finding that critical point where a program crosses from ‘doing nothing’
to ‘doing something useful’. I tried to express this idea in my CUFP
talk, but I failed miserably and it came off as a joke. Sadly I ran
out of time before expanding on it. I have no idea if this is worth
exploring further, but I’ll probably keep thinking about it
nonetheless.