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The issues involved are:
The developer is working on a legacy sub-system that they had never seen before (perhaps the original creators are no longer available, and you need to dig through their work)
That sub-system is written in a different language
The sub-system itself was complicated
The line to be added was an undocumented feature
It took very long to test each change
This was a mission-critical feature, so it needed to work perfectly
You add those all together, and it's easy to see it the other way - "Wow, I'm glad we got that handled in only half a day".
Also, this is a rare case. A developer can write many lines of new code per day.
I think it touches on a bigger issue - just because the end result is simple doesn't mean that finding that result is simple too. For example, the total population for the US at a given moment is a specific number (somewhere around 300 million, off the top of my head). However, to find that exact number requires a huge bureaucracy and coordination among many civil organizations (like hospitals and immigration offices).
It something that any developer could come across, and should therefore be prepared to explain to their managers if needed.
I think you meant to say there are 300 million people in the USA ;)
Hopefully that one line wasn't a comment ;-)
>>Hopefully that one line wasn't a comment ;-)
So where is this famous line of code, then?
C'mon, let's see it.
So how many lines of code did you write before settling on the one?
It will sound silly, but this was the line:
