Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!odi!dlw
From: dlw@odi.com (Dan Weinreb)
Newsgroups: comp.object
Subject: Re: Guthery slams OOP
Message-ID: <1989Nov28.185628.15335@odi.com>
Date: 28 Nov 89 18:56:28 GMT
References: <1989Nov28.004005.3482@mentor.com>
Reply-To: dlw@odi.com
Organization: Object Design, Inc.
Lines: 34
In-Reply-To: plogan@mentor.com's message of 28 Nov 89 00:40:05 GMT

In article <1989Nov28.004005.3482@mentor.com> plogan@mentor.com (Patrick Logan) writes:

   (2) In the paper I read he mentioned (several times) the lack of hard
   data for claims of productivity. This is largely true, sorely lacking,
   and difficult to gather as well as apply.

   Can anyone provide evidence to the contrary for point #2?

In fact, can anyone produce ANY study that provides evidence that ANY
programming language, or methodology, increases productivity?  The
hard part is performing a controlled experiment: you need to have two
programmers (or teams of programmers) with exactly the same skills and
talents and experience (how would you measure that?), and pose them
the same problem, and give them the same amount of time and the same
amount of distractions.  Then, when they each produce results, you
need a highly objective way to evaluate the results, and must decide
upon a metric to use.  It's hard to see how a really good experiment
could be formulated.

You might want to look into the work that the Human Factors community
has done, trying to determine which of several text editors is "best".
They made valient try, but their best results are still scientifically
pretty weak; there are too many holes that can be punched in the
reasoning.  Too bad it's so hard.

For productivity, the best I have found to go on is subjective
reports.  If fifteen people tell me that their C debugging
productivity was greatly increased by using Saber C, for example, my
reaction is not to say "come back when you have quantiative,
scientifically controlled results"; my reaction is to decide that it's
worth my trouble to go try it out and see what I think, and do so, and
form my own opinion.

Dan Weinreb		Object Design, Inc.		dlw@odi.com


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