In the past shortly after programming went from being considered women's work, to being considered men's work (see my thread about thread, and how weaving changed from women's to men's work). Management found themselves with the problem of how to judge the performance of their programmers. You can judge a brick layers performance by the number of bricks layed, a rivet maker by the number of rivets. What's the output of a programmer? It's line's of code.
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