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Python Productivity over C++

Aahz Maruch aahz at netcom.com
Fri Jun 9 18:35:37 EDT 2000 
In article <8hqbvr$fgr$1 at sunnews.cern.ch>,
Wim Lavrijsen <wlav at hpatl26.cern.ch> wrote:
>
>First off, any claim of an order of magnitude increase in productivity
>is pure nonsense. See Brooks for an explanation or Boehms and McConnell
>for hard data.

That's half-true.  Lines of code per unit time is roughly constant per
programmer (though I think Python breaks even that rule).  Of more
interest is the extent to which one language has greater expressiveness
than another for a given domain.  So if Python programs are generally
one-tenth the size of C/C++ programs, there *is* an order of magnitude
increase in productivity.

Where I think Python really kicks butt is in maintenance, though.
Reading Python code is significantly easier than any other language I've
seen; rewriting Python code is also significantly easier.
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