ΔSLOC is just a metric, and what it measures is change to the codebase. Yes, some changes are very important, and others nearly trivial, so it's quantitive because a qualitative metric is a contradiction.
It certainly means different things in different contexts, if it's even meaningful at all. My claim is that +SLOC is entirely meaningless outside of the tautology that it measures what it is, where ΔSLOC is in fact informative about change to the software, albeit not perfectly so.
My hope is to convey more texture here, that programming is more than just one thing. EG: "Today I was mostly debugging". That could have its own measures. I think in large part the measures of programming productivity are often too reductive, the measure is incomplete or tries to measure "programming" rather than its _many_ distinct sub-activities.
ΔSLOC is just a metric, and what it measures is change to the codebase. Yes, some changes are very important, and others nearly trivial, so it's quantitive because a qualitative metric is a contradiction.
It certainly means different things in different contexts, if it's even meaningful at all. My claim is that +SLOC is entirely meaningless outside of the tautology that it measures what it is, where ΔSLOC is in fact informative about change to the software, albeit not perfectly so.