

Productivity Showdown: Python/Django vs C#/ASP.NET - kgrandis
http://kurtgrandis.com/blog/2010/02/24/python-django-vs-c-asp-net-productivity-showdown/

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metaforth
Neat.

One of the arguments I hear against Python is that while initially things
happen fast, the effect does not scale for large applications. Or that
Java/C#'s static type checking makes it more scalable.

I'm curious if you have seen any scalability effects. For example, did the
Python teams productivity stay consistent or did it taper off the further into
the project you got? Did the C# team's productivity go up over time? Stay
constant? Drop?

I'd be really curious to see the time series on the productivity.

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bjelkeman-again
Yes, that would be interesting. I wonder how much this depends on how much
"low level" work one has to do though? In the article he talked about the
programmers not being that familiar with Django yet. It depends of course a
lot on what you are building, but in our development team we find that we
don't touch Python that often and mostly build at the Django layer.

~~~
kgrandis
Both really good questions. That was started almost two years ago so we've
worked on a variety of different types of projects since that initial study--
from simple websites to high-availability, rich applications. Some have
required more internal knowledge of Django than others, but I can't think of a
time where Django itself was an impediment or a bottleneck.

With regards to time series...me too! I don't have enough data to make any
statistically-backed claims, but anecdotally Django-based sprints do start off
with a big bump in velocity, because you're handed a tremendous amount of
functionality upfront via the framework itself, Admin CRUD, etc.. Once a team
gets moving their velocities tend to stabilize, which is one of the reasons
story points and velocities are such powerful estimation and forecasting
tools.

That being said, C# teams seem to have larger standard deviations around their
mean velocity. One thing I have noticed is that refactors tend to have
differing impacts. Major refactor efforts and rearchitecting almost always
noticeably hit the C# team's velocity much more so than the impact on the
Python group. Having done refactoring and and rearchitecting in both
environments, I tend to think it's a function of the syntactical overhead
associated with the C# language.

