When I was a child, I had a strong aversion to pineapples. Just the look of them made me ill. It didn’t matter whether it was cut or uncut; there was just something about the look that made me believe I would not like the taste. Maybe it was the color yellow, but there was something terribly unappealing about the fruit, and no matter how much my mom would entice me with declarations of how sweet it taste, I would not try it.

I felt the same way about cranberry sauce too. It was an emotional aversion; there was nothing logical about it even though I was convinced my reasons were all logical. Cranberry sauce looks slimy; slimy is disgusting; therefore, it must taste like it looks: disgusting. It’s a logical inference; though, it has little relevance to how cranberry sauce actually tastes.

As I got older, I became more open to giving foods a try (and other things, of course) that were unappealing to me. When I finally gave pineapples and cranberry sauce a try, I discovered how I’d been missing out for so long on enjoying a food that was so pleasurable to me.

Much of the software community has a similar aversion to LOC. Many of their arguments against LOC are logical, but they aren’t relevant to the science and practice of LOC as advocated by its adherents. Sure one can write a line of code with more defects than 10 lines of code, but the Law of Big Numbers says the density observed in practice will be the expected value.