A study shows that lines_written/time is language-independent and application-independent for most programmers. If this were true it would imply that the most terse a language is, the more productive a programmer can be on it.
Where can this study be found?
7
Well top result of web search for “lines written time is programming language independent” led me to an article that attributes this to “The Mythical Man-Month” by Brooks:
Brooks is generally credited with the assertion that annual lines-of-code programmer productivity is constant,
independent of programming language. In making this assertion, Brooks cites multiple authors including [7] and [8]. Brooks states, “Productivity seems constant in terms of elementary statements, a conclusion that is reasonable in terms of the thought a statement requires and the errors it may include.” [1] (p. 94)…[1] F. P. Brooks. The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering.
Addison Wesley, Boston, MA, 1995.
…
[7] W. M. Taliaffero. Modularity. the key to system growth potential.
IEEE Software, 1(3):245–257, July 1971.
[8] R. W. Wolverton. The cost of developing largescale software.
IEEE Transactions on Computers, C-23(6):615–636, June 1974.
Article quoted above is “Do Programming Languages Affect Productivity? A Case Study Using Data from Open Source Projects” by D. Delorey, C. Knutson, S. Chun.
For the sake of completeness note that article authors are skeptical about mentioned assumption:
This statement, as well as the works it cites… appears to be based primarily on anecdotal evidence.
Quite the opposite, they claim:
We examine data collected from the CVS repositories of 9,999 open source projects hosted on SourceForge.net to test this assumption for 10 of the most popular programming languages in use in the open source community. We find that for 24 of the 45 pairwise comparisons, the programming language is a significant factor in determining the rate at which source code is written, even after accounting for variations between programmers and projects
2
Here are the references I know of:
“An Empirical Comparison of Seven Programming Languages” by Lutz Prechlt, University of Karlsruhe. http://www.openfoundry.org/of/download/pyzope/1.0.0/article.pdf
1968, referenced in Mythical Man-Month: PL/I lines/year comparable to Assembler words/year
1971, referenced in Mythical Man-Month: Assembler, Fortran, Cobol: roughly equal
1981: “Amount of effort per source statement was highly independent of language level” (Barry W. Boehm’s “Software Engineering Economics” p. 477)
1970: High level languages 3 times as productive as Assembler
Walston-Felix, 1977 “A method of programming measurement and estimation”, IBM Syst. J., 16, 1, 1977, pp. 54-73.
Nelson, 1978 “Software data collection and analysis”, Rome Air Development Center, Rome, NY, September, 1978
References found in:
Chapter 8 of “The Mythical Man-Month” by Fred Brooks
Barry W. Boehm’s “Software Engineering Economics” p. 477