Python vs Ruby

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Wed, 26 Oct 2005 22:35:33 -0500, Andy Leszczynski wrote:

> Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> 
>> 
>> Every line = more labour for the developer = more cost and time.
>> Every line = more places for bugs to exist = more cost and time.
>>
> 
> The place I work at the creation rate is not a problem - we could crank 
> out in the team 1000s lines a week. 

Good on you. I assume those thousands of lines are good ones, and not
just churning out quantity instead of quality.

In any case, no matter how fast you are, you will be faster if you have
fewer lines to write.

> Most time we spend is on maintanance 
> . This is where Pyton shines over Java/C++/Perl. It is easy to read thus 
>   maintane.

Yes. Now imagine how much less maintenance you'd have to do with fewer
lines.

Of course, it is easy to take this to extremes. One thing which is a red
rag to me is when folks have written perfectly good, efficient, fast,
readable code in four lines, and then obsess "how can I write this as a
one-liner?". That way to the Dark Side goes: unreadable, cryptic,
unmaintainable, buggy code.

In any case, lines of code is a very poor metric for measuring programmer
productivity. I'm not even so sure it is better than nothing -- in some
cases, it is *worse* than nothing.



-- 
Steven.