Re: [Caml-list] Re: productivity improvement

[Alessandro Baretta <alex@baretta.com>]

Dave Berry wrote:
> At 13:43 12/07/2002, Markus Mottl wrote:
> 
>>I'd say that depending on the kind of the problem 1:3
>>to 1:10 is reasonable and fits well to the experience of others. E.g.,
>>the Erlang developers also report productivity gains in this range on
>>large-scale commercial projects. OCaml will most likely have similar
>>ratios.
> 
> 
> [comments on the use of Erlang for concurrent programming]

 From this standpoint, Erlang would probably yield a higher 
productivity in intrinsically concurrent problems. But a 
good deal of programming is intrinsically "sequential", from 
the point of view of traditional Von Neumann languages, 
"applicative", from the point of functional languages. 
Further, purely functional code (no refs or mutables) has no 
need for mutexes.

> As a commercial manager, I've seen a productivity improvement of about 50%
> using Java over C++ -- mainly arising from automatic memory management, and
> a slightly cleaner language.  I would expect OCaml to have that 50%, and
> perhaps another for a more expressive type system, making 2:1.  For some
> problems, e.g. compilers, the increase might be more, say 3:1 or 4:1.  For
> comparison, this is also the productivity improvement I'd expect to see
> using Visual Basic over C/C++ for small GUI/Database problems.

I respect your opinion, but I do believe that you are not 
considering issues arising from the debugging and 
maintainance of code. In my opinion, developing an 
application from the ground up is a task that might show 
only a marginal improvement of productivity, but in the 
subsequent phase of debugging and maintainance, I expect the 
difference should be much more significant. An overall 3:1 
productivity improvement is not unreasonable.

Alex

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