Date: Thu, 11 Nov 2004 14:27:40 +0000
From: Andrew Suffield <asuffield@debian.org>
To: gnu-arch-users@gnu.org
Subject: Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: darcs vs tla
Message-ID: <20041111142740.GD9786@suffields.me.uk>
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On Thu, Nov 11, 2004 at 10:32:45AM +0100, Jan Hudec wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 10, 2004 at 20:40:49 +0000, Andrew Suffield wrote:
> > On Tue, Nov 09, 2004 at 10:21:51AM +0000, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> > > I also agree that programs look much nicer and easier to
> > > write in a high level language.
> >=20
> > This is also a feature of programmers, not languages.
>=20
> There is an interesting paper by Paul Graham. He has a hypothesis, that
> a programmer can write about the same number of tokens in a unit of
> time, no matter what language he is writing them in (or little matter).
>=20
> Now that would mean, that programming is more efficient in a higher
> language. The higher here means it can do more work with one statement.

Others have touched on this, but I'll say it shorter:

My point stands as quoted, without reference to time consumed.


I am willing to accept as a hypothesis that some languages may be
faster to write than others, but there is no more than circumstancial
evidence in both directions. Furthermore without a way to quantify the
skill of a programmer in a given language, in a manner comparable to
the skill of a different programmer in a different language, I don't
think it is possible to have real evidence either way. So you won't
really get much mileage out of it.

Subjectively, the programmer appears to be the primary factor in
determining productivity, not the language. Can't be sure of that one
either, though. My intuition is that language variations can gain
improvements in productivity, but not to an order of magnitude. So
like compilers, they can increase the value of your wetware but they
can't solve your problem.

[This is all taking as a given that no radically new and different
language design techniques appear. There hasn't been anything I would
classify as such since C (or for a bit before that, but history
lessons aren't relevant). Von Neumann machines are an example of one,
introducing the concept of machine code].

--=20
  .''`.  ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield
 : :' :  http://www.debian.org/ |
 `. `'                          |
   `-             -><-          |

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