Re: [Caml-list] Great Programming Language Shootout Revived

[Brian Hurt <bhurt@spnz.org>]

On Sat, 19 Jun 2004, Nicolas Janin wrote:

> Thinking about it a little more, the good thing with LOC count is, as I've
> read somewhere else, in large softwares (say > 50,000 LOC), LOC count was
> quite a fairly good measure of the size of a project in terms of spent
> resources. In other words, according to surveys, the effort involved (as
> measured in man-months) was fairly proportional to the LOC count, which is
> why LOC count still prevails as a measurement of a software project.
> However there has never been any survey measuring code size in terms of
> zipped kilobytes unfortunately, although one might suspect the correlation
> between this measurement and the effort involved would be stronger than with
> LOC count.

I beleive it was Fred Brooks who first opinioned that programmers produced
about the same number of working lines of code per month no matter what
the language was- and that therefor higher level languages (by which he
meant Fortran and PL/1) that did more work in fewer lines of code were
more productive than lower level languages (by which he meant assembly 
language).

-- 
"Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea -- massive,
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                                - Gene Spafford 
Brian

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