

Empirical comparison of programming language productivity (2000) - yummyfajitas
http://www.cis.udel.edu/~silber/470STUFF/article.pdf

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jgrahamc
Weirdly, when they get to the programmer productivity bit they decide to
compare _reported_ times for the scripters and _measured_ times for the non-
scripters. Then they go on to try to justify doing this.

Why didn't they just measure them all?

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thorax
Agreed-- this puzzled me as well. I don't really doubt that the scripting
languages are faster in terms of coding time but why not just measure them or
at least have a 3rd party confirm the developer's time?

In any other study of workers, I'm pretty sure even the author would feel
self-reported data would invalidate the results (especially when all of the
"best" scores were self-reported).

e.g. _The ten chosen Honda dealerships reported that they can fix a Honda in
10-23 minutes compared to our measurements that Ford dealerships can fix a
Ford in about an hour and a half._

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aharrison
You have to give this guy some credit for at least trying, but the standing
problem with these types of studies is that there are just too many variables.
For instance, this particular study only consisted of one program. Also, it
doesn't really control for program proficiency very well...he tried, but
environmental impacts are going to skew those results (classes taken, work
environment and language of choice, sample set bias for the previous, etc).
Also, as a previous poster mentioned, these are from 2000. Since 2000, Java
has made serious performance ground. I would be interested to see a few more
studies like this...even if they aren't perfect, they do tend to remind people
that there is a huge difference for language productivity, and that it dwarfs
performance.

Maybe we could get a version where the program was to implement a decent sized
project requiring several developers, to emphasise the code quality angle?
That would take a lot of bored programmers to do, though.

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olliesaunders
I completely agree with this. Reductionism is a poor choice for studying such
things. About limits of reductionism:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductionism#In_science>

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matthewlmcclure
When you post old news, please add the date! This article is interesting, but
much of it is obsolete given that the languages and their implementations have
evolved quite a bit since 2000.

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yummyfajitas
Updated.

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brazzy
The article is from 2000 - it has absolutely not relevance to today's
situation.

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scott_s
If the point of the article was to say "Hey, C's faster than Java!" that would
be true. But that's not the point.

