In a post pointed to by Anarchaia, Steve Yegge rants about code size as the cause of all long-term troubles in software projects. Hear, hear! Yep, I agreed with him eight years ago.

The difference being only that something of half a million lines of code needs to consist of a core/engine which makes it easy to write the rest in at least an order of magnitude less lines of code. Today's TLA for that approach is "DSL" - a concept which only few languages adequately support, IMO: Lisp/Scheme par excellence, along with FORTH and Tcl (and Ruby + Lua trying).