Ask HN: How to choose the right language

Re:Ask HN: How to choose the right language by silentbicycle on Saturday August 15, 2009 @03:23PM (#765085)

The argument that lines of code is constant across languages is usually associated with Fred Brooks's _The Mythical Man Month_. I don't buy it, either. (Sometimes there is the added restriction of "lines of debugged code". That may be more likely.)

Here is a study of how lines of code produced annually differs across languages in a collection of open-source projects: http://sequoia.cs.byu.edu/files/pubs/Delorey2007.pdf

Of course, the correlation between lines of code and "productivity" is pretty nebulous. (Copy-and-paste programming is the most obvious example of a negative correlation.) LoC is an easy thing to measure, but not necessarily useful.

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Re:Ask HN: How to choose the right language by russell on Saturday August 15, 2009 @04:15PM (#765145)

As far as I know, the statement about lines of code was first stated by Fernando Corbato http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernando_Corbat%C3%B3 (Corbato's Law). "It's our experience that regardless of whether one is dealing with assembly language or compiler language, the number of debugged lines of source code per day is about the same! [http://web.archive.org/web/20080206153039/http://home.nycap....]

Python is generally considered to be 2 or 3 times as expressive as Java. I did some estimation on a compiler implementation in C++ and arrived at the conclusion that it could have been done in 20% as much Python.

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Re:Ask HN: How to choose the right language by silentbicycle on Saturday August 15, 2009 @04:30PM (#765165)

Thanks for the source. It was probably more true then - the then-unimaginable resources available now allow very different trade-offs in language design.

(FWIW, OCaml is probably a better language for compiler writing. It hits all its strengths. Failing that, I'd still rather do one in Python or Lua than C, though.)

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