[ Thanks to Jorge R. for
this link. ]
“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…'”