"Years ago, when the paint was barely dry on Visual Basic 3.0, a developer showed me a CD-ROM-burning application he'd written using that toolkit. The idea was to prototype the UI in Visual Basic, then rewrite in C++ for performance. But in the end, he admitted somewhat sheepishly, 'we shipped the prototype.' I saw nothing to be ashamed of. It was--and is--a brilliant strategy. My only regret is that it hasn't been adopted more widely. Here's Guido van Rossum, Python's inventor, on programmer productivity:
"'It wouldn't surprise me if the amount of typing Python requires is five times less than Java for a typical piece of code. When you have that much less code, it's so much easier to maintain, and also to change. This is all very informal, but I heard someone say a good programmer can reasonably maintain about 20,000 lines of code. Whether that is 20,000 lines of assembler, C, or some high-level language doesn't matter. It's still 20,000 lines. If your language requires fewer lines to express the same ideas, you can spend more time on stuff that otherwise would go beyond those 20,000 lines...'"
