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Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!tektronix!tekcad!franka
From: franka@tekcad.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: Re: lisp productivity question - (nf)
Message-ID: <145@tekcad.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 27-Nov-83 16:57:39 EST
Article-I.D.: tekcad.145
Posted: Sun Nov 27 16:57:39 1983
Date-Received: Mon, 28-Nov-83 23:06:07 EST
Sender: franka@tekcad.UUCP
Organization: Tektronix, Beaverton OR
Lines: 18

#R:smu:10900002:tekcad:3600002:000:799
tekcad!franka    Nov 27 13:57:00 1983

	I don't have any documentation, but I heard once from an attendee
at a workshop on design automation that someone had reported a 5:1 productivity
improvement in LISP vs. C, PASCAL, etc. From personal experience I know this
to be true, also. I once wrote a game program in LISP in two days. I later
spent two weeks debugging the same game in a C version (I estimated another
factor of 4 for a FORTRAN version). The nice thing about LISP is not that
the amount of code written is less (although it is, usually by a factor of
2 to 3), but that its environment (even in the scrungy LISPs) is much easier
to debug and modify code in.

               				From the truly menacing,
   /- -\       				but usually underestimated,
    <->        				Frank Adrian
               				(tektronix!tekcad!franka)