Date: Thu, 11 Nov 2004 15:43:14 +0100 (CET)
From: Karel Gardas <kgardas@objectsecurity.com>
To: Andrew Suffield <asuffield@debian.org>
Subject: Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: darcs vs tla
In-Reply-To: <20041111142740.GD9786@suffields.me.uk>
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Hello,

On Thu, 11 Nov 2004, Andrew Suffield wrote:

> 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.
> > >
> > > This is also a feature of programmers, not languages.
> >
> > 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).
> >
> > 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.

the simple evidence is whole IT industry, especially focusing on bussiness
oriented systems. Don't you see all these projects slowly migrating from C
to C++, from C++ to Java or even to VisualBasic/Python?
The truth is simple, highler-level languages are more easier to be used,
more quickly to be written than such double-edged knife like C/C++.

> Subjectively, the programmer appears to be the primary factor in
> determining productivity, not the language.

I'm afraid you are not right. Have you ever tried modern OO-based
languages like Eiffel, Java, Python or modern FPL like Concurrent Clean,
Haskell, especially in comparison with plain old C? Heck, even assembler
is language, would you like to claim that good programmer in assembler is
able to compete with good programmer in higher-level lang when writting
application-based code (i.e. not OS)?

Thanks,
Karel
--
Karel Gardas                  kgardas@objectsecurity.com
ObjectSecurity Ltd.           http://www.objectsecurity.com


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