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"Clinical Trials" For Programming Languages?

Posted by samzenpus on from the apples-and-oranges dept.

theodp writes "High school junior Charles Dawson's New Year resolution is to write a new program in different language each week. It's an ambitious project for someone of any age, and while it won't give him an in-depth appreciation of programming language differences, it'll certainly give him greater insight into the strengths of certain languages than would perusing the Hello World Wikipedia article. Lots of claims are made about the comparative productivity of programming languages, but have there been any landmark studies that measure the efficacy of a programming language's productivity claims in a 'clinical trial' of sorts? Would head-to-head tests against other languages be a better way of sorting out Popularity vs Productivity vs Performance claims, or is relying on more nebulous claims of superiority the best we can do?"

4 of 232 comments (clear)

  1. That is a beautiful start of a ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    long flamewar

    1. Re:That is a beautiful start of a ... by brausch · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The real problem is that different languages are often created to solve different problems. You can't really compare them very easily with any single program, no matter what non-trivial program that you use. For example, C is a better programming language than Javascript for some problems; Javascript might be better than C for some other problems.

      I'm advanced to expert in about six languages and have decent experience in a dozen others. I've settled on about four that I use a lot, and that fit the kinds of problems that I work on. Other equally skilled and experienced programmers (programming for over 40 years) would choose a different set of languages better suited to solving the problems they routinely work on.

      It's kind of like trying to compare the toolbox of a plumber with the toolbox of a mechanic. There is overlap of course but there are also specialized tools.

      --
      "Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it." - George Santayana
  2. Languages for professionals by gnasher719 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    With everything, there are professional users and amateur users. For amateur users, it's important to get reasonably good results with relatively low effort without much learning. For professionals, what counts is the effort for projects the size a professional does, after learning a lot.

    Trying a new programming language every week cannot give any useful information to a professional user, because the language can only be judged on how well it works for inexperienced developers on tiny projects. That's not what professionals do.

  3. Re:99 bottles of beer by Savage-Rabbit · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There is already a pretty good collection http://www.99-bottles-of-beer.net/

    There is also a website with the implementations of the Perl cookbook in a bunch of languages: http://pleac.sourceforge.net/

    Where performance is concerned I'd go for something like the Debian Benchmarks game. The time taken for this benchmark task, by this toy program, with this programming language implementation, with these options, on this computer, with these workloads. With enough people participating in the pissing contest you eventually get things optimized to hell and the wheat is separated from the chaff.

    http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/
    http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/play.php

    As for productivity, that's harder since this is highly subjective. While you can generally postulate that coding in non typed scripting languages where you don't have to worry about memory management is going to be faster than coding in a typed, manually memory managed language like C. But what happens when you compare more similar languages like Python vs. Perl? Your productivity in a language is highly dependent on your experience with it, how fast you are at typing, how intuitive the syntax is to you.... etc... But different programmers can have different issues with languages. In Perl for example the syntactic freedom can actually lead some programmers to write bugs bugs into their code because they are used to languages with a more nailed down syntax.

    --
    Only to idiots, are orders laws.
    -- Henning von Tresckow