Python Productivity Gain?

[Matthias]

Harry George <harry.g.george at boeing.com> writes:

> Normally a science passes through phases:
> 
> a) Natural History.  Wander around, get the lay of the land,
> collect specimens, and try to organize what you find into mnemonically
> effective schemes.
> 
> b) Field Research.  Pose a hypothesis, isolate a piece of the field as
> best you can, and apply your experimental factors and controls.
> Observe results and interpret with a large grain of salt.
> 
> c) Lab Research. Set up isolated envieonments with significant
> attention to eliminating non-experimental reasons for variation.  Pose
> the hypotheses.  Observe results, and interpret with recognition that
> a lab may be a poor model for reality.
> 
> You are asking that we jump to lab research when the field barely
> sustains field research.  Mostly we are still in natural history and
> anecdotes.  

We agree in the description of the current situation.  That only few
lab research (with a selection of suitably created language variants
[1]) is being done is a political decision, however.  It's more sexy
to create-and-hype new languages/tools/processes than to do actual
research.

> Of course, even in the natural history phase pioneers and advance
> scouts are capable of detecting an easier pass through the mountains
> of comlexity.  If 20 people from varied background, each of whom has
> worked in several languages, tell me that Python is a really great
> language, then I'll take that as a significant data point.  Especially
> if they are dumping their previously favorite languages (as varied as
> COBOL, Perl, Java, C++, VB, Modula-3, Lisp, Prolog) to focus on
> Python.

The problem with this approach is that if you go to a LISP/ Prolog/
Modula-3/ etc. newsgroup and ask around, you will find 20 people from
varied background telling you that LISP/ Prolog/ Modula-3/ etc. is a
really great language. In better randomized samples, popularity vote
will be strongly biased toward languages with strong marketing.

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.

  Matthias

---
[1] An example of a study that I would call scientific is Lutz
Prechelt, Walter F. Tichy: "A Controlled Experiment to Assess the
Benefits of Procedure Argument Type Checking", IEEE Trans on
Soft. Eng., 1998, where two almost identical languages are compared in
a small application domain.  The only difference is that one language
does some type checking, the other does none.