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From: summers@gort.cs.buffalo.edu (Michael Summers)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Software Productivity Using Lisp
Summary: How Productive are Lisp Programmers?
Message-ID: <11297@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU>
Date: 3 Oct 89 18:39:51 GMT
References: <5896@lifia.imag.fr> <865@skye.ed.ac.uk> <2084@munnari.oz.au>
Sender: nobody@acsu.buffalo.edu
Reply-To: summers@gort.UUCP (Michael Summers)
Organization: SUNY @ Buffalo
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Does anyone have any data on lisp programmer productivity
using various software development environments? I am
particularly interested in SW productivity in environments
with strong symbolic debuggers such as GENERA, SUN's SPE and
TI's systems.

I am interested in any sort of hard data. I realize that I
may get a lot of responses discussing, how hard it is to
quantify SW productivity, how it really depends on what you
are doing and on the programers abilities, how lines of code
estimates are meaningless etc. What I really would like is
any sort of real data with as much background information as
possible.

Comparisions between the number of lines of code needed to
produce simular functions when working in your favorite lisp
environment vs other languages environments would be
appreciated. Also any sort of estimate on the number of
lines of code produced per day would be helpful.

I hear SW engineers use figures like 8 to 12 lines of debugged
code a day. My gut feeling is that a good lisp programer working
in an advanced environment with a good debugger, inspector,
etc. should be an order of magnitude more productive than
this. My guess is that this is due to,

   1) The number of  useful high level functions
in languages like CL and the various machine specific
extensions like SCL that save time over coding in "C" for example.

   2) The time saved debugging the code through the use of
the symbolics debugger and interactive environment.

I once listened to a talk by a representative of a lisp
machine vendor who said that their system was designed to
make code production cheap and thus to make rapid prototying
an economic reality. Does the community verify this?