Ask HN: How to choose the right language

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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