What is Backfiring?
Capers Jones has done a good deal of research regarding the expressive power of computer languages. He sometimes refers to this as language level. In particular, he has produced tables that indicate how many statements of code it takes to implement a function point. Obviously, this figure varies by computer language. It should be noted that there is a minor religious war regarding the difference between number of code statements and number of lines of code. Jones’ tables are based on number of statements. This was done minimize the impact of different coding styles. For example, some programmers write several statements on one line, while others will break a statement into several lines. Unfortunately, using statements raises the following problems: • Counting statements is usually harder than counting lines of code. The rules are usually more complicated. Therefore, if the count is manual it takes longer.
Capers Jones has done a good deal of research regarding the expressive power of computer languages. He sometimes refers to this as language level. In particular, he has produced tables that indicate how many statements of code it takes to implement a function point. Obviously, this figure varies by computer language. It should be noted that there is a minor religious war regarding the difference between number of code statements and number of lines of code. Jones’ tables are based on number of statements. This was done minimize the impact of different coding styles. For example, some programmers write several statements on one line, while others will break a statement into several lines. Unfortunately, using statements raises the following problems: • Counting statements is usually harder than counting lines of code. The rules are usually more complicated. Therefore, if the count is manual it takes longer. If the count is automated, a more sophisticated counting program must be acquire
