Bytøpia

A couple of years ago I have discovered this silly definition of the word Yegge on Urban Dictionary. For those who don't know Steve Yegge is a software developer, a former Google employee, and an author of his blog Stevey's Blog Rants. So the UD definition of "Yegge" goes as following:

A measurement of length of a piece of writing, particularly when indicating a length excessive for the genre. A Yegge is approximately 4000 words or 25 kilobytes.

Named for well known programmer and technical blogger Steve Yegge, whose blog up to about 2009 was notorious for entries of approximately 1 or 2 Yegges in length, vastly exceeding the typical length of blog entries in the genre.

Usage example: "I knew breaking up with him was a good idea after I got an email two Yegges long listing all the reasons why I should take him back."

Steve's writing is indeed quite verbose, thus this definition sounded hilarious to me. In fact, I liked it so much that I started using this expression in my everyday speech. At some point I thought it would be a fun thing to actually measure text in those units. And where do I primarily work with text? In Emacs, of course. Fast forward 15 minutes, the code was written:

(defun count-words--message (str start end)
  (let* ((lines (count-lines start end))
         (words (count-words start end))
         (chars (- end start))
         (yegges (sqrt (* (/ words 4000.0) (/ chars 25000.0)))))
    (message "%s has %d line%s, %d word%s, %f Yegge%s and %d character%s."
             str
             lines (if (= lines 1) "" "s")
             words (if (= words 1) "" "s")
             yegges (if (= yegges 1) "" "s")
             chars (if (= chars 1) "" "s"))))

I overloaded count-words--message function to include Yegges count beside regular statistics. This function is used by count-words and other similar facade functions. Because the UD definition is ambiguous in terms of whether to use words or characters to count Yegges, I take a geometric mean of them both. So now count-words should show us something like this:

Buffer has 52 lines, 389 words, 0.096522 Yegges and 2395 characters.

Neat! Now we can measure how many Yegges the whole buffer, or just the selected region contains. While being fun, this metric works surprisingly well — page count usually gives no idea about amounts of text because it depends on the font size and margins; number of words or characters are too big and unwieldy. Also, since the metric aggregates both word and character count, it punishes such cheating as abuse of small words and abbreviations as well flooding the text with non-alphanumeric symbols.

Until you get an intuitive grasp of how much is a Yegge here's a short table of example texts together with their sizes:

I hope this post makes you smile, and who knows, maybe encourages to adopt this cool text metric. Happy writing!