Quantity vs Quality

In early 1982, Apple implemented a weird tracking system:

Every Friday, engineers were required to submit a form for the number of lines of code they had written.

Bill Atkinson didn’t like it.

He was the brilliant mind behind Quickdraw and Lisa UI.

To him, the art of programming wasn’t about quantity, but quality.

He had just completed a major optimization of Quickdraw’s region calculation engine.

Through a stroke of genius, he had rewritten the entire system using a simpler, more general algorithm.

The result was amazing.

Region operations now ran almost six times faster than before.

But there was a catch.

This optimization hadn’t added to the codebase; it had drastically reduced it.

Bill had managed to eliminate around 2,000 lines of code while improving performance.

Friday came and it was time to fill the form.

Bill stared at the “Lines of Code Written” field.

After a moment’s contemplation, he wrote: -2000.

The management was confused.

Was it a joke? A protest? How could someone write negative lines of code?

But Bill didn’t care. He continued refining the Lisa’s interface.

Finally, after a few more rounds of confusing submissions, management decided to stop asking Bill to fill the form.