Python Productivity Gain?

[Peter Hansen]

Lothar Scholz wrote:
> 
> A good study of this would cost around 750000 US$ and take at least
> one year with 2 or 3 persons per team. It's not a problem for IBM or
> SUN to pay for it.
> But they live on selling consulting hours. Why should they be
> interested in a study of who to increase programmer productivity ?

They do much more than consult, as they sell/lease substantial amounts of
software and hardware, as well as working on many very large fixed-price
projects.  For all of those, minimizing their own costs would be very 
important to achieving a good margin and profitability.

Besides, they spend enormously more than US$750,000 each year on much 
less important studies.  Overall, they spend almost 7000 times that much
each year on R&D (according to their 2000 annual report), which means that
spending US$750,000 on a study like this would be very roughly as if you
or I were to spend $10.

For my own company, the study would be quite costly.  For a much larger
company it's a drop in the bucket, and might well contribute to them
gaining a competitive advantage.

The likelihood is that they (IBM and others) already fund such studies
internally, but don't make the results public.

Possibly equally likely, however, is that any such studies are seriously
flawed and support the political position of whomever funds the project,
or whomever leads it.

Which gets us right back to square one...

-Peter