e-LOC

I’d like to introduce a metric for developer APIs that I call “e-LOC”. I am not great with names, so it’ll just have to wait until someone gives it a better one. Meanwhile, let’s explore it.

The definition of e-LOC is as follows: e-LOC of a technology is the order of magnitude of lines of code that one needs to write to get to a working product prototype using this technology. Applying the usual metric prefixes, we get ourselves a nice scale: 0-LOC, deca-LOC, hecto-LOC, kilo-LOC, mega-LOC, and so on. 

Various APIs reside on different parts of this scale. A finished, functioning product is 0-LOC. On the other side of the scale is a developer surface that requires gazillon of lines of code to produce something that we can reasonably offer to our friends and colleagues to try out. Want to build a web-based product prototype? It’s probably going to be hecta-LOC. A brand new Web rendering engine? You’re likely looking at a mega-LOC.

The order of magnitude serves as a decent measure of developer barrier to entry. For a deca-LOC, it’s just a handful of lines of code, so the barrier is very low. For Web rendering engines, only a skilled, determined, and well-funded team of developers can overcome it.

Because of this barrier to entry property, the e-LOC can serve as a leading indicator for the amount of innovation that will happen around a given technology. Put differently, e-LOC can be used to measure innovation potential of a technology. 

New OSes and rendering engines are one-shot, lonely affairs. They undoubtedly innovate, but the fruits of this innovation are singular and rare. On the other side of the scale, if it takes 60 lines to make a working Discord bot that generates pictures using Stable Diffusion, nearly anyone can do it. Expect a lot of people to be messing around with these APIs and trying to build something interesting with them.

Another useful property of e-LOC is that it also indicates how much opinion is contained within the API or technology. More opinionated APIs will tend to have lower e-LOC, while the less opinionated ones will trend higher in numbers. Of course, lower e-LOC doesn’t make the API good. That’s not what this metric measures. Some of the most troublesome, gnarly APIs are deca-LOCs.

The opposing directions of opinion and developer barrier to entry present an interesting tension in innovation potential. A 0-LOC technology is fully opinionated and requires zero lines to use. Because of that, it also has zero innovation potential. The innovation potential increases proportionally to the amount of opinion that could still be added, yet the barrier to development tapers it off as the e-LOC scale increases.

Advancing the state of my earlier developer funnel framing, we can draw this as a curve to illustrate the relationship of technology innovation potential and e-LOC. The curve starts at near-zero at the beginning of the scale, then rapidly expands to its maximum value at around deca- and hecto-LOC, then drops off in a power law fashion as the magnitude of lines of code keeps increasing. The near-zero at the start is significant: in my experience, even finished products end up growing APIs, whether they want it or not.

This metric gives us a nice way to orient our thinking around the purpose of the technology we might be building. How much innovation do we want it to spur? If we want to minimize it, we ship only finished products. If we want to maximize it, we must relentlessly drive our APIs to be in deca-LOC range.