Re: Programming language productivity
John Bokma wrote: Also note that Python programmers write more lines/hour which they need to finish in the same time as Perl programmers :-D. You probably want to say that a Python program tends to have more lines than an equivalent Perl program. I think that a LOC comparison between a language that enforces line breaks and another language that enables putting an lots of code in one line doesn't make much sense. I wonder why comparisons aren't made in terms of word count. Word count would include literals, constants, variables, keywords, operators, bracket- and block delimiter pairs. Python indent/unindent would of course also count as block delimiters. I think this would be a more precise measure for software size. Peter Maas, Aachen. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Programming language productivity
Peter Maas wrote: I think that a LOC comparison between a language that enforces line breaks and another language that enables putting an lots of code in one line doesn't make much sense. I wonder why comparisons aren't made in terms of word count. Word count would include literals, constants, variables, keywords, operators, bracket- and block delimiter pairs. Python indent/unindent would of course also count as block delimiters. I think this would be a more precise measure for software size. I don't disagree, but word counts aren't so simple, either to define or to implement. What counts as a word? Parser tokens? That counts a.b (or a::b, or a-b, depending on language) as 3 words. Block delimiters? After a month, you don't even notice them in properly formatted code, which is why python doesn't have them in the first place. Operators? Then e.g. a = b + c + d + e counts more than a = add (b, c, d, e). The complexity of expressions seems determined by the numbers of operands; using operators as well arguably overcounts. Regardless of the above choices, you still need a parser (or at least a lexer) to count anything. Whitespace separation won't cut it - what happens with 'for (i=0;i5;i++)' or 's = foo bar baz'? If you toss out operators, you could almost get away with regular expressions for counting the identifiers, keywords, and literals. But there's still the problem of overcounting string literals. Line counts are simple to compute and it's easier to agree on which lines to count. Thus their popularity. -- Edward Elliott UC Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall) complangpython at eddeye dot net -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Programming language productivity
Peter Maas [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: John Bokma wrote: Also note that Python programmers write more lines/hour which they need to finish in the same time as Perl programmers :-D. You probably want to say that a Python program tends to have more lines than an equivalent Perl program. No, I was just making a joke based on the graphs given on the site mentioned earlier. I think that a LOC comparison between a language that enforces line breaks and another language that enables putting an lots of code in one line doesn't make much sense. I wonder why comparisons aren't made in terms of word count. Word count would include literals, constants, variables, keywords, operators, bracket- and block delimiter pairs. No idea, I consider comparisons like this quite meaningless when people attempt to use them as a kind of quality measurement. -- John MexIT: http://johnbokma.com/mexit/ personal page: http://johnbokma.com/ Experienced programmer available: http://castleamber.com/ Happy Customers: http://castleamber.com/testimonials.html -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Programming language productivity
John Bokma wrote: Connelly Barnes [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://barnesc.blogspot.com/2006/05/programming-language-productivity.h tml C:3 hours to write the program, 5 hours to track down the memory leaks Java: 4 hours to write the program, 6 hours to get all the exception handling right C++ 5 hours to write the program after reading Stroustrup for 6 hours Just kidding, of course. Also note that Python programmers write more lines/hour which they need to finish in the same time as Perl programmers :-D. -- John MexIT: http://johnbokma.com/mexit/ personal page: http://johnbokma.com/ Experienced programmer available: http://castleamber.com/ Happy Customers: http://castleamber.com/testimonials.html I am not shure whether your criterion is very valid. OK if you have to write only one compact piece of code like in your example. Sometimes I think that most python users fall within this category. Once you get involved in larger projects, the dynamic nature of the programming tool becomes much more important. I mean by this, the ability to stop running code, modify or add to it and continue without having to re-establish the state of the program. This may sound trivial to many, but in major applications setting up the state again can take a considerable processing time. Such feature should be available from within the debugging tools. In fact, languages like Smalltalk, Lisp and even VB offer this possibility. Ruby coming up strongly these days also has this dynamic reload capability. To sum up, I like Python very much but I don't understand how come this basic flaw has not been taken care of. It is sufficient to search for reload to see how many people have struggled with it over the years. I hate the idea of having to take up Ruby to really find out how it could serve me better in this most critical productivity area. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Programming language productivity
malv [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: [snip] Once you get involved in larger projects, the dynamic nature of the programming tool becomes much more important. I mean by this, the ability to stop running code, modify or add to it and continue without having to re-establish the state of the program. This may sound trivial to many, but in major applications setting up the state again can take a considerable processing time. Such feature should be available from within the debugging tools. In fact, languages like Smalltalk, Lisp and even VB offer this possibility. Ruby coming up strongly these days also has this dynamic reload capability. To sum up, I like Python very much but I don't understand how come this basic flaw has not been taken care of. It is sufficient to search for reload to see how many people have struggled with it over the years. I hate the idea of having to take up Ruby to really find out how it could serve me better in this most critical productivity area. What is major project? We have 50 people working on a project, over 5 years, in Python. Much of the regresison test can be done by rebuilding context in RAM (no need to persist). That is immediate (whole test suite runs in a few seconds). Sometimes we have to reestablish context by clearing the database and then reloading objects from test_input XML files. That is slow (perhaps an over night job). I've yet to experience a context where language features are the rate limiting step. On the other hand, I have definitely experienced language as a rate limiting factor in a) peer code reviews, b) debugging, c) ramping up new team members. Python wins those battles everytime. -- Harry George PLM Engineering Architecture -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Programming language productivity
On Fri, May 19, 2006 at 02:21:39AM -0700, malv wrote: Once you get involved in larger projects, the dynamic nature of the programming tool becomes much more important. I mean by this, the ability to stop running code, modify or add to it and continue without having to re-establish the state of the program. This may sound trivial to many, but in major applications setting up the state again can take a considerable processing time. Such feature should be available from within the debugging tools. In fact, languages like Smalltalk, Lisp and even VB offer this possibility. Ruby coming up strongly these days also has this dynamic reload capability. To sum up, I like Python very much but I don't understand how come this basic flaw has not been taken care of. It is sufficient to search for reload to see how many people have struggled with it over the years. I hate the idea of having to take up Ruby to really find out how it could serve me better in this most critical productivity area. Please stop saying 'Python' should support this like 'Ruby' because 'Ruby' doesn't -- Rails, the application, does. Rails can do it most of the time because it knows the particulars about Rails objects. If you are messing with the internals of Rails I'm sure an call to 'Dispatcher.restart_application'[1] has a good chance of dying. Complain to the developers of python _applications_ if their app doesn't have this feature. As I said last time you b*tched about it, there can't be a standard magic reload that works on everything. Application developers can implement something that works for their specific application because they know the internals. If you are going to complain please at least post some context about what you think should happen and some links to how other folks have implemented it. Asserting python should do 'Reload and Go' isn't very helpful. -Jack [1] I googled up a reference to it here http://www.unpossible.com/2006/04/20/time-saver-rails-console-reset/#comments -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Programming language productivity
Hi Python folks, I created a summary PDF of two studies on programming language productivity: http://barnesc.blogspot.com/2006/05/programming-language-productivity.html One notes that Python and Perl are the two best languages by the number of hours to solve problem metric. I ran into these studies when I was learning Common Lisp, and Googled lisp productivity. The 2nd hit described the frustrations of Brandon Corfman in trying to reproduce Norvig's Lisp solution to a problem. This led me to Norvig's article, which cited the two given studies. There may be entire areas of academia devoted to studying the productivity problem; if so, then I am not familiar with the research in that area, so please let me know where I should look for better/more recent research! - Connelly Barnes __ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Programming language productivity
Connelly Barnes [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://barnesc.blogspot.com/2006/05/programming-language-productivity.h tml C:3 hours to write the program, 5 hours to track down the memory leaks Java: 4 hours to write the program, 6 hours to get all the exception handling right C++ 5 hours to write the program after reading Stroustrup for 6 hours Just kidding, of course. Also note that Python programmers write more lines/hour which they need to finish in the same time as Perl programmers :-D. -- John MexIT: http://johnbokma.com/mexit/ personal page: http://johnbokma.com/ Experienced programmer available: http://castleamber.com/ Happy Customers: http://castleamber.com/testimonials.html -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
