Wednesday, August 22, 2012

The Comparative Productivity of Programming Languages

http://www.drdobbs.com/jvm/the-comparative-productivity-of-programm/240005881

I would have expected programmers to be about as efficient in C# as in Java. Of course it is possible the underlying statistical model is not correct for making a statement like this. E.g. in the sample there were many seasoned Java programmers but on the other hand many relative junior C# programmers. If so, was this taken care of in the regression?

2 comments:

  1. I would not be surprised if the nature of the project made a difference, and some languages tend to be used more frequently for certain kinds of projects. ASP is obviously popular for web projects, but do people build standalone applications with it? COBOL was, and I think still is, popular in financial transaction software, where perhaps lower productivity is tied to more anal testing (?).

    Object oriented languages supposedly make reuse of components easier, but that does not seem to be reflected in the numbers.

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  2. The ecosystem of a language (libs, tools, ...) probably has a bigger effect than the syntax of a language. Yes, there are many variables (project size, programmer experience, project quality, ...) to put any confidence in that claim (although I like the fact that Java is winning ;). Maybe when they have data on 1 000 000 projects instead of 6 000 and they group the results by project size.

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