The Comparative Productivity of Programming Languages | Dr Dobb's | Hacker News Reader

The Comparative Productivity of Programming Languages | Dr Dobb's

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17 pointsrohshall8 comments

For those who read the comments before the content, ABORT ABORT! It's not even worth your time to read about why it's not worth your time.

Agreed.

Also -- ASP is not a language, unless they're talking about VBScript, which I would have thought would be lumped with VB.

That didn't bother me. I think there's a legit argument to be made for classic ASP as its own language. The lack of distinction between .NET and pre-.NET languages was the irksome bit for me. Edit: But far from the only irksome bit, hence my warning to others. :)

Agree with Softbuilder. Treating all function points equally and trying to come up with a generic "programming hours per fp" is about as useful as asking "How heavy is a rock?"

The list of languages covered made me look at the date on the article. I was almost certain it would be pre-y2k.

Sounds like a blinkered enterprise Java-centric worldview to me. To have ASP as the only scripting environment listed is just plain crazy in 2012. If you're going to include scripting at all, where are Ruby, Python, Perl, PHP, Javascript? If you want to talk about the productivity boost from high-level languages, you have to include these.

The last paragraph of the article is devoted to explaining why that is.

PHP was still a bit surprising, but the answer might be in the list there, too. Any list that ranks classic ASP, COBOL, and C# has to be working with source data that represents a very particular and non-representative corner of the software industry. Of course with a chance to look at that data costing €5,200 we can probably only speculate. . .

As was softbuilder, I was motivated to ABORT before the last paragraph - thanks for persevering for the team!

Reminds me of the Monty Python killer joke sketch where the joke is translated by a team of people line by line.

Now I know not to use Cobol for my next project, with data to back that up. Progress.

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