Python Productivity over C++

[Wim Lavrijsen]

stevemul at ozemail.com.au (Steve Mullarkey) writes:

>I have read in several places productivity claims of 5 to 10 times over
>'C' and "C++". I would like to ask for some feedback from "C++"
>programmers who have moved to Python as to whether these estimates are
>realistic.

I'm a C++ programmer (leave out the quotes ;) ).

First off, any claim of an order of magnitude increase in productivity is
pure nonsense. See Brooks for an explanation or Boehms and McConnell for
hard data.

<snip enumeration of tools>

>I don't want to start a flame war but, given the above, I just can't see
>where the productivity increase is generated. I am genuinely interested
>to ask "C++" programmers :-

>1. What productivity increase do you achieve ?

>2. How long did you use Python before you achieved increased
>productivity ?

I want to use Python for scripting tasks. I dislike 'ordinary' scripting
languages as they lack the ability to recover from errors; a problem that
Python, being a real programming language, does not have.

Up to now, I've been using C++ for scripting. I'm not proficient in Python
yet, so writing a Python script takes far longer than writing a C++ utility
and the Python code itself is larger than the equivalent C++ code.

What I expect from Python, is that I can reuse scripting utilities,
something that I do not do for C++ utilities. This could, perhaps, yield
a 10% increase in productivity, but I'm not writing scripts all day, so
my overall productivity increase will be negligible.

Most of all, however, I enjoy the incremental coding (I come originally
from a Smalltalk background). I *like* Python, which is all excuse I need
to use it.

Best regards,
         Wim Lavrijsen