Python Productivity Gain?

[Matthias]

"kbass" <kbass at midsouth.rr.com> writes:

> In different articles that I have read, persons have constantly eluded to
> the productivity gains of Python. One person stated that Python's
> productivity gain was 5 to 10 times over Java in some in some cases. The
> strange thing that I have noticed is that there were no examples of this
> productivity gain (i.e., projects, programs, etc.,...).  Can someone give me
> some real life examples of productivity gains using Python as opposed other
> programming languages.

In every language community you will find people claiming that their
favorite language X is 5-10 times more productive than alternatives.
Typically this is justified by personal anecdotes.

A scientific study in this regard is

@misc{ prechelt-empirical,
  author = "Lutz Prechelt",
  title = "An empirical comparison of C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Rexx, and Tcl for a search/string-processing program",
  url = "citeseer.nj.nec.com/547865.html" }

This study reports a programmer productivity gain of about 2 for all
the scripting languages over C, C++, and Java.  It is a pity that not
more attempts to gain /unbiased/ information on software productivity
are undertaken.