An Empirical Study to Revisit Productivity across Different Programming Languages

The development of High-level programming languages(HLPL) is a long process of evolution, which has gone through procedure-oriented languages, object-oriented languages, script languages and visual & database languages. Throughout the process of evolution, coding in an efficient and convenient way is the primary impetus. Hence, the productivity should vary across different languages. When evaluating the productivity of developers coding in different programming languages, such variations are usually ignored, which may not reflect their actual coding efficiencies and make the developers feel unfair. Especially, ignoring the variations will lead to inappropriate baselines of process performance, thus may potentially reduce the effectiveness of quantitative management. In this paper, we conducted an empirical study to revisit the productivity variations across different programming languages based on the data of International Software Benchmarking Standards Group (ISBSG) and a software organization. We found that, in most language categories, the productivity is all significantly different in ISBSG and the organization respectively. In the software industry represented by ISBSG, the relative productivity levels are gradually increasing with the evolution of HLPL. However, for the organization, it does not always keep the same increasing trend, but the average productivity within the four categories is almost stable. The finding could guide the software organization to establish an appropriate productivity baseline.