It looks like the exponential model isn't a good fit at all -- in all cases it undershoots the decay at the start of the graph and overshoots at the tail end. So while it might "look close" there is some systematic that your model doesn't account for. In particular, I don't agree that all code in a codebase has a constant risk of being replaced -- most projects have different components that are developed at different rates. Some components are legacy code that is likely to never change, while other parts are under rapid development. In fact, I'd argue that's why the tail is so long -- legacy code is called "legacy" for a reason. And the tip of the graph dives down so quickly because code being rapidly developed has a higher chance of being replaced.

I'd posit that the reason is a nuance of #2, more thought was put into older code on the design of how it should work before making it work. Now we write code so fast that we have to scrap it all and do it again a second time to fix the mistakes of the first time [0]. I'm of the mind that upfront planning would've likely taken less time, but that's simply my opinion and I don't have anything to back it up besides anecdotal experience. The current practice of "move fast and break things" very well could be a better approach.

[0] I'm only mentioning this footnote due to the article picking on Angular (fairly or unfairly), but the point I made that this is footnoting is relevant to them potentially.

Results for WordPress https://blog.yoavfarhi.com/2016/12/06/half-life-wordpress-co...

Just Amazing.

I wonder if there any research articles discussing the correlation between code-change and other metrics like product quality, change frequency of team members, estimation success, etc.

Look at how consistently the lines of code grow for these projects. I doubt that is surprising but think about the implications. Linux is a pretty old open source project and still on balance the lines of code just grow.

How many lines of code will it be in fifty years? Will we have to come up with new systems to manage the fact that individuals only really understand smaller and smaller pieces of it? Will it reach a mass where like a black hole it collapses from some uncomprehensible failure?

There have never been things like this that just grow in complexity forever.

My rule of thumb is that if a line of code survives its first five years it'll live forever. The age of a piece of code is the single greatest predictor of its future.

Code from year one may still be the same code but when it gets moved or reformatted its cohort is updated. If a bad change is reverted, will the cohort for those lines of code also be reverted? The effect of understated longevity is not so obvious when it is gradual and organic. Sometimes an event in a project's history makes the effect very obvious.

https://blog.yoavfarhi.com/2016/12/06/half-life-wordpress-co...

I really like this. Suppose we were to accept the suggestion that perhaps linearly decaying code is better built, and more robust, than exponentially decaying code.

Would this give newbies a great new tool to answer their question of which framework or language to learn?

Rails or Django? Django lasts longer. Angular or React? VueJs just a trend?

You could answer all these questions with this kind of analysis.

If someone wants to make a genuine contribution, a blog post contrasting the various decays of Javascript frameworks would be a hit.

Clojure takes a remarkably stable and additive approach to maintenance and growth. Graph for it is here: http://imgur.com/a/rH8DC

I'm not a dad and I actually appreciated the "Git of Theseus" pun. The ship is an interesting thought experience on identity, maybe you can modernize it to introduce philosophy to computer science students ^^

But more on-topic, nice article, well done!

Good job and great tool. Thanks.

This might actually be an interesting metric in regards to project architecture and/or project management.

Totally agree that exponential model explanatory power is great.

Great stuff here.

Definitely some merit to reason #3 - people are more willing to work on something that they can easily build on top of.

A lot of projects I've worked on have utility libraries consisting of mostly stateless, pure functions -- I have a theory that these constitute some of the longest lived code. That, and database models, which tend to be easier to expand than to contract. I'd be curious to see some analysis along these lines.

Interesting, but it is not surprising that git and redis are more stable than node and angular. Git and redis are well defined problems that won't change that much. Angular is a framework and node is a platform. They should change more. But then again... javascript fatigue is a thing from what I heard.

The simplest explanation is that the exponential model is not a good one (does not correspond to the underlying dynamics), and so the half time value is not an inherent (time-independent) property of the codebase, but depends on its age. It seems to me that in most projects, the code evolves quickly in the beginning and then stabilizes on a slower linear decay. This would explain the observed dependence of the fitted half life on age. It might be more meaningful to fit a linear dependence at the beginning of the project and in the asymptotic regime and also look at their ratio. This should be more stable, would tell you how well was the project designed from the beginning, and would also indicate whether the project has already stabilized or not.

Would love to see this restricted to which lines are actually executed in a typical use. I.e. ignore dead code which is still in the repo.

Probably wouldn't be too hard for the interpreted languages.

I wish we could capture the "inventiveness" of a particular project — how well the problem was understood when the project initiated.

There had been _many_ *nix'es by 2006, so the territory had significant prior art and with it collective deep understanding of the problems being solved. Angular sprouted alongside a number of other SPA frameworks in an ecosystem that was experiencing a "growth-spurt" (using that term loosely) — lots of variables.

This is awesome. I ran it on pyramid for fun. http://imgur.com/a/KZ9KR

Another feature of the model could be stability of product vision. Is there a correlation between the half-life of committer membership and that of the code? How has the problem space of the product changed over time?

Perhaps we could talk about "intrinsic churn" vs. "accidental churn". The former results from the codebase keeping up with the "drift" in the problem space; the latter comes from having to learn.

There are still AAA games shipped with code written by id Software 20 or more years ago. Tools too :)

Super interesting.

But it doesn't seem fair to directly compare 2005 14 year old stable 2.6 Linux to projects which did basically foundational initial releases and not mention it.

Great work. Would be interesting to compare by language - see if particular languages need more or less refactoring.

So its true... Angular is the code abyss, my colleagues said it was a legend but I have seen it with mine own eyes.

Thank you

Would be interesting to see the results as a function of repository size.

Maybe Linux is not rewritten because it doesn't have tests

There's a pretty definite threshold, perhaps somewhere in the early 10,000's of lines(depending on the language and how densely you wrote it), where the system becomes bigger than your headspace, and at that point, I think, the real challenge for code reduction begins. And there are some very big wins possible by consistently reducing the problem into "language for solving the problem plus trivial code in that language" - VPRI's STEPS articles [0] demonstrate as much.

But it's perceptually less work to accrete a few hundred new lines to the system than to engineer a 10x reduction that introduces an entirely new architecture layer, so nobody does, or only a few research-driven projects. Programmers are, after all, lazy and deadline-driven. And while proprietary software tends to accrete due to corporate dynamics creating an environment of continuous growth, open-source projects are often built on accretion as an assumed benefit.

My own software goal, having viewed this landscape, is to be stubborn enough for long enough to score some of the 10x wins and share those so that "more with less" becomes a little more viable. I do think that all codebases go obsolete eventually, but the overall ecosystem doesn't have to depend on them so long there's data and protocol compatibility.

[0] http://vpri.org/html/writings.php

> There have never been things like this that just grow in complexity forever.

The evolution of the species? Homo sapiens seem rather complex.

Perhaps what we'll see is that over time, large portions of what have been long list of pedantic instructions become decision models that get tweaked over time. Imagine when referring to the size of a software system using two numbers: MLOCs and MDPs (Matured Decision Points). Not unlike industrial revolution assembly lines compared to the automated factories of today — modern factory workers are some degrees removed from the step-by-step movements.

Linux already relies on specialized tools - like Cocinelle=spatch - to migrate very large codebases at once. Linux has also grown from a hobbyist project into a fairly complex (informal!) organization of highly-skilled full-time developers, just to keep development manageable.

I think one of the main reasons that something like Linux keeps on growing is that it needs to support more drivers as they come onto the market. So unless you want to remove support for older hardware, you're more or less going to grow endlessly.