Apple Made Lisa Programmers Report Weekly Lines of Code, So Bill Atkinson Made QuickDraw Six Times Faster and Wrote -2000

The Lisa software team was six months from its ship target. Some managers wanted to track each engineer’s output week to week, so, as Hertzfeld puts it, “They devised a form that each engineer was required to submit every Friday,” with a field for lines of code written.

Atkinson was the author of QuickDraw and the Lisa’s main user interface designer. Hertzfeld writes that he “thought that lines of code was a silly measure of software productivity,” and that his goal was a program as small and fast as possible.

That week he was finishing work on QuickDraw’s region calculation, the code that works out the shapes of overlapping areas on screen. He “had completely rewritten the region engine using a simpler, more general algorithm,” which “made region operations almost six times faster.” The rewrite also “saved around 2,000 lines of code.”

Then the form came due for the first time. At the lines-of-code field, Hertzfeld writes, Atkinson “thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000.”

This whole story is one first-hand telling. Hertzfeld was on the Macintosh team at the time, and he says plainly what he doesn’t know: “I’m not sure how the managers reacted to that.” What he does know is that a couple of weeks later they stopped asking Atkinson to fill out the form.

Teams that now measure AI coding tools by lines generated or pull requests merged are running the same Friday form at a much larger scale. A tool that writes 2,000 lines a day looks productive on that chart, and the engineer who deletes them looks idle. The number managers would actually want is the one Atkinson improved: how fast the thing runs and how little of it there is to break.