A public relations problem

A public relations problem

Maybe I'm just a bad C developer. ;-)

All joking aside: For a project where I can fully harvest the benefits of Python features like tuples, generators, memory safety and the wide selection of readily available libraries, I routinely write in 5 lines what would have taken 50 in a language like C. (I'd put modern C++ – that is C++11 or later – somewhere in the middle, let's say 3x faster than C and 3x slower than Python.)

Not only does that save me the time it takes to type those lines, but several studies suggest that the bug density (bugs per line) is roughly independent of the choice of programming language*, which means I save the time needed to debug those lines.

Coming up with a simple example to demonstrate the benefits of a programming languages is always difficult, but I'll try anyway.

Here's a 5-line Python function. The function depends on the standard library re (regular expression) module, and it's used with the built-in sorted function.

def natural(s, _re=re.compile('([0-9]+)')):
    """ Provides a sort key for obtaining a natural collation of strings.

        >>> sorted(['Figure 2', 'Figure 11a', 'Figure 7b'])
        ['Figure 11a', 'Figure 2', 'Figure 7b']
        >>> sorted(['Figure 2', 'Figure 11a', 'Figure 7b'], key=natural)
        ['Figure 2', 'Figure 7b', 'Figure 11a']
    """
    return tuple(
        int(text) if text.isdigit() else text.lower()
        for text in _re.split(s)
    )

If you count the docstring, it's 10 lines, but then you also have unit tests (python -m doctest natural_sort.py).

And yes, I'll go out on a limb and say that the above is representative of maybe 80% of the Python code I write – except for the number of lines, of course. ;-)

If put to the challenge, I'm sure that someone can come up a more or less equivalent C function in less than 50 lines (or less than 15 lines of C++). But it'll take them significantly longer than the 10 minutes it took to write the above, and it won't be nearly as readable (YMMV).

*) I know, I know, it's nearly impossible to measure with any level of scientific rigor, and the research is highly contested. Still, some references:

Ray et al., 2014. A Large Scale Study of Programming Languages and Code Quality in Github.

While the paper draws no conclusions, its data suggests that Python has roughly twice the bug density (bugs per SLOC) of C, C++ or Java. (Assuming Python has at most half as many SLOC than the equivalent C, that's still a win.)

Phipps, 1999. Comparing observed bug and productivity rates for Java and C++.

Apparently (haven't read the study) suggests that C++ has 15–30% more defects per line than Java.