What is Science? [LWN.net]

What is Science?

Posted Jul 1, 2012 11:15 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)
In reply to: What is Science? by Wol
Parent article: Why learn C? (O'Reilly Radar)

For any given programmer, their productivity measured in LOC is roughly constant regardless of the language.

Easy there. That is one of the foundations of function points, as seen in Casper Jones' "Applied Software Measurement"; and it is also utterly wrong. Otherwise we would all be programming in "5th generation languages", i.e. Excel macros.

If you want anecdotal evidence, my productivity (measured in LOC/day) in Perl or in assembly is abysmal. On the other hand, in PHP my productivity is insanely great writing garbage that doesn't work, just great for working code, but if I want to develop tight code then it becomes glacial. In Java it is great but diminishing asymptotically as I approach correct, maintainable code.

There are also serious arguments: high-level languages are less important for productivity than high-level frameworks which do everything for you, be it in C, Python or Excel. But the quality of the framework then becomes the dominant factor; if it takes ages to track down frequent bugs then productivity plummets faster than a sheep from a tree. As we have not yet invented measures for framework quality or completeness, the question of productivity remains completely open and mostly independent of the language.

In time I have learned to distrust frameworks, especially when they are high level. (By the way, I contend in passing that PHP is a framework rather than a language.)

(Log in to post comments)