But they aren't measuring software productivity by lines of code...

> The article show's several graphs of Lines of Code over Time. Isn't this an outdated way to measure anything in software? "Measuring software productivity by lines of code is like measuring progress on an airplane by how much it weighs." - Bill Gates

Lines of code is not a good measure of productivity, but it's a relatively decent measure of complexity. Bad developers can write many lines of code that adds little productive functionality, but still increases the overall code-base's complexity.

A 100k LOC code base is probably not 100X more functional than a 1k LOC code base, but it is very roughly 100X more complex.

Where did you get the idea that they’re measuring productivity by lines of code? I think you’ve imagined that.

Nothing in the article suggests they’re measuring anything but the scale of the problem.

It’s quite a decent way to show how much you use a language in an organisation.

With this much Python, Dropbox is in a position where integrating MyPy with Bazel is worth the trouble.