>>>>> "Greg" == Greg Earle <earle@isolar.Tujunga.CA.US> writes:

    Greg> Considering as how the NetBSD esp driver
    Greg> (/usr/src/sys/arch/sparc/dev/esp.c) is only ~ 2000 lines of
    Greg> code and is ~ 50K, and the SunOS 4.1.x esp.c is over 5000
    Greg> lines of code and is ~ 125K, it's amazing that we can get by
    Greg> with only needing a few external debugging hooks like the
    Greg> conf flags!

    Greg> 	- Greg (Who is amazed all this stuff works and works
    Greg> as well as it does, and is glad that we have the magicians
    Greg> who knew how to code it)

Indeed. Of course it helps when the magicians were/are people like
Chris Torek and Van Jacobsen. [No disrespect to everyone else who's
worked on the sparc BSD code.]

You also have to consider how Big Companies manage their software and
their programmers. One of the metrics they use is the number of bugs
per X lines of code. The lower the number, the higher quality the code
supposedly. This gives programmers and their managers an incentive to
pad out their software so they get bonuses and promotions from the
beancounters because of the code's is deemed to be high(?) quality....