Certainly an oxymoronic subject, and not without justification- any decent high-level language developer will leverage existing libraries that have been designed for optimal performance (at least among the majority of use cases). Optimization and high performance in these environments often focuses on architectural and engineering disciplines, not a science of algorithm optimization and memory management. Certainly, any developer worth their weight should understand the basic concepts in computer science, but you’re not likely to find a vast array of efficient search algorithms implemented in Javascript or Ruby. Development platforms (and in turn, high-level languages) are built with the best possible performance in mind to enable developers to create and build without focusing on plumbing code. This does not, however, limit a language or environment’s ability to provide efficient methods of data management, nor should it preclude a developer from leveraging the most efficient (and safest, and sanest) solution possible.
perl
WordPress Trivia, Part 1
I say ‘Part 1’ with no intention to write Parts 2, 3… n.
A quick Google search for ‘how many lines of code in WordPress’ came up with squat. I came up with over 350,000:
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1 2 |
[robert@hermes wordpress]$ a=0; for i in `find . -type f`; do a=$(($a + `wc -l $i | awk '{ print $1 }'`)); done; echo $a; 364304 |
Granted, that includes the readme and license, but given the size of this codebase, there has to be some cruft, right? While I was absentmindedly perusing wp-includes/functions.php the other day I stumbled across this gem: