Eh, here Fowler just falls into to the trap of the Perfect Solution fallacy. I repeat: there are no perfect measures of productivity. But there are imperfect

Eh, here Fowler just falls into to the trap of the Perfect Solution fallacy. I repeat: there are no perfect measures of productivity. But there are imperfect measures that have some utility. The idea that we cannot measure at all because we cannot measure perfectly is simply untrue. In this case we could, for example, take 1000 individuals with similar years of programming experience and given them two languages and a non-trivial problem to solve and see how long they take to come to a working and correct solution. Is that perfect? No. But it's still something that's measurable. Do that with a reasonably large sample and you can probably start making inferences. Our industry suffers from a horrible lack of concrete, scientific studies to back common wisdom. We would all benefit from ignoring Fowler, here, and getting down to the nuts and bolts of finding solutions to that problem. Until we do, while we'll have lots of fun having pointless debates on HN that cannot be resolved because we have no real data, the industry simply won't move forward.