Python Productivity Gain?

[Paul Prescod]

Matthias wrote:

>...
> 
> If people say "I'm doing X and I'm very happy with language Y for
> reason Z" that's fine.  But we probably should stop over-selling
> languages (or tools or processes) claiming large increases in
> productivity without having solid evidence at our hands.

I feel that anecdotal evidence is better than no evidence. Before we had 
modern science people would tell each other berries to eat and not to 
eat based on anecdotal evidence. Sometimes you would get it wrong 
(tomatoes) but you got it right more often than wrong and that saved 
lives (in our case it could be weeks of effort wasted).

I am quite comfortable saying that individual programmers are more 
productive in Python than in most languages, with a very high degree of 
confidence for lower-level languages and more fuzziness for higher-level 
languages. I've converted many programmers who have no reason to be 
biased in favour of Python and they all agree with me. I've seldom heard 
anyone claim (for example) that they were more productive when they had 
to manage memory allocations (or registers!) manually.

I would be less comfortable talking about teams, especially large teams. 
I don't have as many anecdotes to draw from there and "logic" could lead 
you either way (e.g. common wisdom is that static typing helps large 
teams to avoid stepping on each other's toes).

  Paul Prescod