Lines of Code: A Flawed Metric - A Lisa Team Anecdote

In early 1982, Apple's Lisa team tracked engineer productivity by lines of code. Bill Atkinson, QuickDraw's creator, found this metric absurd, prioritizing concise, efficient code. He optimized QuickDraw's region calculation, achieving a six-fold speed increase while reducing code by 2000 lines. On the productivity form, he famously reported '-2000'. Management wisely stopped using this flawed metric.