The point of the article is just to say "make it count". But since everyone is talking about the number of lines...
This reminds me of the time when this company giving requirement to all their employers to write down how much line of code they have written this week and this senior engineer who was working on an optimization problem wrote -1000. From there on the company removed that policy. (forgot the company, person's name, and the number)
I would have written that as $LOC_DELETED + $LOC_ADDED (i.e. if it was 3000loc and I deleted those and rewrote it in 1000loc, I'd put 4000loc). After all, deleting lines is a net positive change for the project and you need to think a lot about exactly which lines to delete.
This reminds me of the time when this company giving requirement to all their employers to write down how much line of code they have written this week and this senior engineer who was working on an optimization problem wrote -1000. From there on the company removed that policy. (forgot the company, person's name, and the number)