With language X, you’ll write code 10x faster!!1one

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008

I’ve been hearing a lot of “With language X, you’ll write code 10 times faster!” kind of remarks in the last couple of years, where “language X’ can be substituted for the latest hip language or framework. I might even have shouted it about Python a couple of times myself. But does it really matter that much? On an average project, I spend maybe 30% on programming. The rest goes to planning, communicating, research, design, documentation, delivery, support, etc. And of that 30% a large portion is usually debugging, polishing, documenting (in the form of comments), making sure I’ve caught all the errors, finding weak spots in the code which might lead to bugs, checking if the security is okay, etc. Maybe silver-bullet-language-X helps in some of those cases, but I doubt it is very significant in the grand scheme of things.

I’m not really trying to make a point here or anything. Just an observation. Maybe something worth discussing.