Python Productivity over C++

[Boudewijn Rempt]

Wim Lavrijsen <wlav at hpatl26.cern.ch> wrote:
> 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.

I'm not entirely sure - I would like to see some hard data, but I think
that having a language which assembles all the best practices and
discards all the worst might offer a significant improvement in
productivity. After all, many cents make a dollar, too. 

I'm not really sure whether scripting languages aren't as much a leap
as the leap from first to second generation languages was. The results
mentioned in that paper comparing C++, Java, Perl, Python & Tcl by Lutz
Prechelt (http://wwwipd.ira.uka.de/~prechelt/Biblio/jccpprtTR.ps.gz)
were suggestive. To quote (p. 28) "Designing and writing the program in
Perl, Python, Rexx or Tcl takes only about half as much time as writing
it in C, C++, or Java and the resulting program is about half as long."

Simply put, with Python you need less statements, and the amount of
statements a programmer puts out is constant (be it assembly, C or
Python - I think that's in Brooks, too), so the amount of effort needed
is correspondingly less.

Of course, that doesn't take into account the oft-mentioned variabilty
in programmer prowess - the best can crank out ten times as much code
than the worst. That's why the people developing KDE can push out more
C++ code than I can Python ;-(.

--

Boudewijn Rempt  | http://www.valdyas.org