On Friday, 23 August 2013 at 16:50:27 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote: [..]
Frankly, the fact that line counts are used at all has already decremented the author's credibility for me.
I agree that LOC is a very poor measure, but I think the intent was to offer some sort of comparison of syntactic complexity or code bloat (think Haskell vs. Java). Counting lines or non white-space characters is a low hanging fruit - anything more sophisticated seems to be quite difficult.
More importantly, LOC is also used in relative mode to show the fraction of code, which had to be modified for parallelism.
