Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!apple!rutgers!sunybcs!gort!summers 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 Lines: 38 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?