| Defining and measuring the productivity of programming languages (2004) | |||||||||||||||
Abstract | |||||||||||||||
| The overall objective of programming support systems is to make it possible to produce software faster with the same workforce, with no degradation, and possibly an improvement, in software quality. Generally, there are two ways to approach this goal. First, we can increase the effectiveness of individual application developers by providing programming languages and tools that enhance programming productivity. Second, we can broaden the community of application developers by making programming more accessible. As it happens, the use of higher-level languages and programming interfaces supports both these strategies: by incorporating a higher level of abstraction, such languages make application development both easier and faster. (For the purposes of this paper, we will define “programming language ” to encompass the entire toolset— language, compiler, debugger, tuning tools—associated with the language.) We must, however, ensure that these advantages do not come at the cost of performance. Programs written in a high-level language and intended to solve large problems on highly parallel machines must not be egregiously less efficient than the same applications written in a lower-level language. If they are, then the language is unlikely to be | |||||||||||||||
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