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.