One thing that the article does not address is what it means by 'big'. I suspect that the measure is a simple 'lines of code'.
I presently work in Ruby and one of our major applications, which I would class a medium in size, clocks in at 10,075 including all the tests but excluding HTML, CSS and _javascript_.
I used to work in Java and personally I would expect that the same application in Java would be at least 35,000 LOC if not more, depending on which 'industry standard best practices' de-jour were being employed.
One of our old, organically grown, built out of edge cases monsters is 55,115 LOC. This is what I would consider big in the Rails world.
How can we compare 'bigness' when some languages are inherently more verbose than others.
A 10,000 LOC Java project is Hello World with features. One of our more complex systems is only 5,178 LOC
Dynamic languages will have a lower LOC value to implement the same functionality. So when comparing the 100,000 LOC Java application against 100,000 LOC Ruby application I would expect the Ruby application to have more problems because the Ruby application is doing 3 to 4 times more that the Java application.
What would count as a big APL program? 100 LOC?
