Programming language makes more productive

hwayne / awesome-cold-showers

For when people get too hyped up about things

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Programming language makes more productive #17

Open qznc opened 4 years ago

qznc commented 4 years ago

Hype: Programming language X makes you more productive

Shower: An experiment with more than 600 professional programmers shows that (apart from assembly) programming language makes no difference.

Caveat: Was done in the 80s with Fortran, Cobol, C, Pascal.

Unfortunately, the book is not freely accessible. Maybe someone knows a paper version? Maybe even a more recent study?

hwayne commented 4 years ago

Code Complete, right?

qznc commented 4 years ago

Peopleware. Oops, I did not intend to leave the book title out.

Found this excerpt. Is that ok for "freely accessible"?

hwayne commented 4 years ago

Fraid not :/ Rigorous sources are really important here, as they give the reader the ability to evaluate the data for themselves.

It might be more feasible to find a followup study with more modern languages. If you can find the original paper PeopleWare is citing (if any), we can use semanticscholar.org to trawl the citation graph.