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From the interview with Tom Love, co-designer of Objective-C: "Does productivity depend more on the quality of the programmer or the characteristics of the pro
by comatose_kid 17y ago
From the interview with Tom Love, co-designer of Objective-C:
"Does productivity depend more on the quality of the programmer or the characteristics of the programming language?
Tom: The effect of individual differences will far outweigh any effect of the programming language. Studies from the 1970s show for programmers with the same educational background and same number of years' experience, the number was 26:1 individual differences. I don't think anybody claims that their programming language is 26 times better than somebody else's."
I wonder what others think of this, especially in light of Lisp vs. blub debates?
- swannodette 17y agoIt's mostly true. But it also means programming languages attract certain kinds of programmers, a language that fits their individual differences. The reason I moved to Lisp is simple. I was tired of syntax. I was tired of the language straight jacket. I'm always surprised that these things never bother other programmers. It surprises me even more that programmers tediously compare the features of their language when any non-trivial program means a large API (that is a language on top of another language). Once you realize that, who really cares about language features? What you want is something malleable. You want something that can program the program. You want (as has been said elsewhere) a language for growing languages. Instead of wasting time learning about each language's arcane meta programming facilities- learn how to write macros, and you can have all the meta programming facilities you'll ever need. But this doesn't seem to interest most programmers, I guess that's part of the individual difference thing.