Re: Static vs. Dynamic typing
Re: Static vs. Dynamic typing
- Subject: Re: Static vs. Dynamic typing
- From: Marco Scheurer <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 3 Jul 2003 00:47:36 +0200
On Wednesday, July 2, 2003, at 11:45 PM, Nadyne Mielke wrote:
Marco Scheurer <email@hidden> wrote:
[snip]
One such research was made in 1996. See for instance
http://www.theadvisors.com/langcomparison.htm
According to this table, coding in Objective C is twice as productive
as coding in C++.
I seriously question the validity of that work. They're using function
points, which is a software metrics methodology developed for
functional programming languages. Function points don't work well for
functional programming languages, but are even worse for any
object-oriented language.
I think that Tom Gilb said "anything can be measured in a way that is
better than not measuring it at all". This is engineering, not science,
and "back of the envelope", "rule of thumb" and "seat of the pants"
estimates are useful to us.
I agree with you that function points are not ideal, but they are
better than nothing. Don't be abused by the term "function" in function
point: this does not imply a functional programming language (and btw I
think you are confusing functional such as LISP and procedural such as
COBOL). This is a measure of the functionality offered by the program:
at the end of the road you've got to write a certain amount of lines of
code to provide a given function. So there's nothing against using
function points for software built with OO languages: it is not an
internal metric like the number of procedure or the cyclomatic
complexity.
A more valid objection about this table is the focus on languages, when
the development environment, class libraries, and so on are also
important. So of course it does not say that "having unlimited
undo/redo in your app is done twice as fast in Cocoa as in Visual C++".
Marco Scheurer
Sen:te, Lausanne, Switzerland
http://www.sente.ch
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