Making D better than other programming languages (warning: rant, drivel)

Dave Dave_member at pathlink.com
Mon Oct 30 10:32:55 PST 2006


Walter Bright wrote:
> LaggedOnUser wrote:
>> The best metric for productivity across languages appears to be Lines 
>> of Code (LOC).  The productivity for a typical programmer is inversely
>> proportional to the number of lines of code he/she has to write.
> 
> I agree. My experiments with real D projects compared with their 
> equivalent C++ ones is that the D ones about about 30% less source code.
> If the proportionality rule applies, that makes it 30% more productive.
> 
>> That "something else" is probably the fact
>> that both are essentially dynamically-typed, easy-to-use, scripting 
>> languages that are terse and expressive.
> 
> I think the dynamic typing thing along with gc are the big productivity 
> drivers.
> 

In the link for the OP, one thing that apparently wasn't considered or adjusted for is how many 
errors during development, and how long it took to find those errors.

Often I see that dynamic typing will mask errors, and make them a lot more time consuming to both 
debug and (sometimes) workaround once they are found. And often they make it through to production 
code as well.

So I'm wondering if, in the grand scheme of things, dynamic typing really accounts for a 2.5x 
difference in productivity anyhow?

Thanks,

- Dave



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