From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from majordomo@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id OAA11884; Sun, 20 Oct 2002 14:52:05 +0200 (MET DST) X-Authentication-Warning: pauillac.inria.fr: majordomo set sender to owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr using -f Received: from concorde.inria.fr (concorde.inria.fr [192.93.2.39]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id OAA11690 for ; Sun, 20 Oct 2002 14:52:04 +0200 (MET DST) X-SPAM-Warning: Sending machine is listed in blackholes.five-ten-sg.com Received: from FUSMTA03-LRS (mta03.btfusion.com [62.172.195.12]) by concorde.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.11.1) with ESMTP id g9KCps500918 for ; Sun, 20 Oct 2002 14:51:58 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from [217.39.212.1] (helo=7p8420j) by FUSMTA03-LRS with smtp (Exim 4.05) id 183FYA-0006gq-00; Sun, 20 Oct 2002 13:51:22 +0100 Message-Id: <4.1.20021019205725.01442878@pop3.btclick.com> Message-Id: <4.1.20021019205725.01442878@pop3.btclick.com> X-Sender: daveb@pophost.tardis.ed.ac.uk X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 4.1 Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2002 13:46:47 +0100 To: Eray Ozkural , Dave Berry , Markus Mottl , Oleg From: Dave Berry Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Re: productivity improvement Cc: OCaml In-Reply-To: <200210180548.10452.erayo@cs.bilkent.edu.tr> References: <4.1.20021017221827.0091c6f0@pop3.btclick.com> <4.1.20020714213245.00a37f00@pop3.btclick.com> <4.1.20021017221827.0091c6f0@pop3.btclick.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Precedence: bulk Eray, I think you misunderstand where I'm coming from. I would love to see more people using ML instead of C++. I was part of a team that produced one of the commercial SML compilers. All three commercial SML compilers have failed, partly because it's very difficult to persuade people to switch. People aren't stupid, and they won't switch to a new language without some compelling evidence that it gives an advantage. I believe that a 2:1 or 3:1 gain in a meaningful measure -- the best measure being overall cost -- would be sufficient to persuade a reasonable number of people to switch. But, we need concrete evidence. This is hard to obtain, because few people have the time to write a project twice, using different languages. What's more, when studies of this sort have been done, comparing more conventional languages, the results have shown that the choice of language makes little difference to the overall cost of the project. So there's a widespread suspicion of claims that language X or Y increases productivity by significant amounts. In this context, figures plucked from the air are, at best, not helpful; I think they're actually counter-productive. To an extent, the bigger the claims, the more counter-productive they are, because they're easier to challenge. I would rather have one verifiable claim of a 3:1 productivity improvement -- which is a pretty big win -- than a hundred unverifiable claims of 10:1, 20:1 or even 40:1 gains. (Given earlier postings on this thread, it's worth reiterating that the type of program is also vital -- e.g. figures for a one-week project may not scale to a ten-year project). This thread gave one very useful example: the rewrite of Ensemble. IIRC, this gave a 7:1 gain in LoC over the original C version. Even if one allows for the benefit of writing the program a second time, and for the fact that LoC doesn't necessarily correlate directly to development time, this is still an impressive figure. Way back when this thread started, I quoted another example: Andrew Appel's Tiger compiler. This has three versions, one in C, one in Java, and one in SML. The SML is shorter, but not to such a great extent. (I need to recheck the actual figures). Dave. ------------------- To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/ Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners