Unfortunately these stats likely mean nearly nothing when you separate them out on some more important dimensions. Javascript productivity is likely incredibly

Unfortunately these stats likely mean nearly nothing when you separate them out on some more important dimensions. Javascript productivity is likely incredibly variant as you have such a diverse set of tools/libraries/build-systems within it. At the top end you have people using async/await, Typescript, hot reloading, and a litany of libraries and patterns they have learned over years, test suites that encourage writing more tests more easily (Jest, Ava), and huge downstream efforts in tooling like the recent profiling improvements in Chrome devtools or profiling/errors in React. In the end my best guess at what roughly equates to real-world productivity ends up being much more centered around the following metrics: - Richness of developer debugging tools - 3rd party library maturity - Online community, documentation, examples (chat + q&a) - Ability implement better design patterns easily - Type systems - Feedback loops (hmr, auto-restart, easy package writing) Further, lines of code is a poor metric for effectiveness. As an example in JS, I much prefer a more explicit, less functional, and more spaced out style of code as it is really quite easy to read and debug and in effect takes no more time to write than the more dense functional style. Caveat: I only skimmed the attached paper, but writing these thoughts to provide a counter to what I assume is the claim there.