A father of these being, as usual Dijkstra: in his EWD1036-28 &quot;On the cruelty of really teaching computing science&quot; (1988-12-02) he notes<p>&gt; it is only a small step to measuring &quot;programmer productivity&quot; in terms of &quot;number of lines of code produced per month&quot;. <i>This is a very costly measuring unit because it encourages the writing of insipid code</i>, but today I am less interested in how foolish a unit it is from even a pure business point of view. My point today is that, <i>if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as &quot;lines produced&quot; but as &quot;lines spent&quot;</i>: the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger.<p>(emphasis mine)<p>Though of course &quot;lines of code&quot; in Dijkstra&#x27;s essay is itself only a proxy, a line of Java code and a line of Perl code have fairly difference costs.