Editorial

How do you learn to program? An eternal subject of debate among programmers.
 Recently I marveled
 at the productivity implied by 500 lines of code a day.
 Fortunately, 500 lines was a bit much for Tomáš Kouba too (Java.NET)
 and he went looking seriously into productivity measured in lines of code (LOC) in his post Programming speed.

In any case, you can call a programmer who produces 100 lines of source code in a day a star. Of course, I mean code that’s debugged and fully working. Someone who writes and debugs 100 lines in two days is average, but their productivity shouldn’t give their managers any reason to complain.

On a rather different note, the little powerhouse called Ant
 is an invaluable workhorse on most projects. A couple of articles take a look
 at what’s new in version 1.6.

• Stefan Bodewig New Ant 1.6 Features for Big Projects via TheServerSide discussion
• Geoffrey Wiseman Managing Build Complexity with Apache Ant 1.6

Equally interesting was the official press release
 from the Eclipse Foundation announcing the release of version 3.0, which has been in development
 for over fifteen months. The big day is 30 June 2004. Schoolchildren will take home their report cards, and 
 version 3.0 will get one too, from its users.