Three Lines of Code in Two Weeks — It's Not Always Laziness

I've been thinking about this topic for a long time and finally decided to write it down. This whole business of evaluating code by the number of lines written, or other attempts to estimate the volume of work, has always bothered me. I don't write code on an industrial scale now, maybe just some small tools for myself. But I used to write a lot of code and did it for over 15 years. You'd come to the office in the morning and start writing something, saving along the way, of course. And in the evening, I sometimes liked to hit ctrl+z and watch in fast-forward, even if in reverse order, how the cursor moved, how blocks of code were highlighted, appeared, and disappeared. First, a condition and a loop would appear in one place, then a piece of code from the loop would move into a procedure, the loop would disappear entirely, etc. It's a mesmerizing dance of the cursor and the text beneath it. By the end of the day, a new concise procedure, a couple of insertions into existing blocks. In