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perching_aixyesterday at 9:39 AM1 replyview on HN

One sentence that stood out to me from there was this:

> The bottom line is that there are thousands of developer years of work that went into the current versions of Word and Excel, and if you really want to clone those applications completely, you’re going to have to do thousands of years of work.

This is blatantly not true. Only a small portion of all those "thousands of developer-years" is going to be actively present in these products at whatever point in time, as a lot of those developer-years are spent on replacing the output of other developer-years.

It's the difference between 117 billion humans ever having lived, and 8 billion humans currently living (and just some number of millions at any point in time before the industrial revolution - we've been around for a while, supposedly).

And this is still ignoring that someone looking to reimplement Office would be racing towards something pre-existing, rather than trying to come up with it in the first place. A lot of those developer-hours were spent on design and research, rather than rote implementation.


Replies

gus_massayesterday at 1:28 PM

I half agree. The grow of the final version is not linear, but I guess it's still like sqrt(time) or something. There is a lot of refactoring and backend changes, but also there are a lot of obscure "features" that accumuate.

(It would be nice to make a study about the number of LOCs in Chrome or other big open source project. LOC is not a perfect metric, but it's better than just guesing.)

Word has a compatibility configuration window with a lot of weird features, like (totally made up) add 3 pixels if a bullet list starts a new page because it was the default in WinWord 1.7. And there are like 10 of to mimic 10 versions and perhaps even other editors.

Also, a log time ago Word has a "feature" that converted automatically every acronym into a "Mini Card" or "Smart Card" or something with a dotted underline and a rectangle that appeared when you put the mouse over it. It was annoying. There is still code to show them, and perhaps even code to create them.