> It seems indicative of nothing, not quality, especially not readability nor maintainability.
It's not meant to be indicative of any of those things (though I'd argue, all else being equal, maintaining an application with more LOC is harder than one with less).
It's indicative of complexity and scale. A programmer can read through an entire 500 LOC program and will know everything about the program. This becomes much more difficult for a 50K LOC program and outright impossible for a 5 million LOC program.
Taking a 50K LOC program and bringing it down to 10K (regardless if that's by refactoring, removing unneeded code, or rewriting in a new language) makes it much easier for each developer to know/understand a larger portion of the program.
Prior to my current job I had only worked on relatively small applications (<25K LOC) and I was blown away by the difference between working on things like that and working on something measured in the millions.
[And in this specific context I doubt it would be on the front page of HN if somebody took 500 lines of C++ and rewrote them in a hundred lines of Go, i.e. knowing the LOC is useful to determine if this was a meaningful undertaking or not]
It's not meant to be indicative of any of those things (though I'd argue, all else being equal, maintaining an application with more LOC is harder than one with less).
It's indicative of complexity and scale. A programmer can read through an entire 500 LOC program and will know everything about the program. This becomes much more difficult for a 50K LOC program and outright impossible for a 5 million LOC program.
Taking a 50K LOC program and bringing it down to 10K (regardless if that's by refactoring, removing unneeded code, or rewriting in a new language) makes it much easier for each developer to know/understand a larger portion of the program.
Prior to my current job I had only worked on relatively small applications (<25K LOC) and I was blown away by the difference between working on things like that and working on something measured in the millions.
[And in this specific context I doubt it would be on the front page of HN if somebody took 500 lines of C++ and rewrote them in a hundred lines of Go, i.e. knowing the LOC is useful to determine if this was a meaningful undertaking or not]