I really like the idea of comparing languages in a real-ish scenario of development, written by independent expert-in-language developers! As a web dev, I'm particularly interested in the idea of this for comparing the various web frameworks (including "no framework").
Some thoughts on the experiment:
- To get a better idea of the impact of the language on authors' thought processes, it'd probably have to include submissions from more authors in each language. With just one (or so) submission per language, I could see there being variation in expertise.
- I'm curious to see what the documentation looks like here, that there's so much written in some of the submissions, and that the paper authors value it so highly. Is it used to explain what the code does, indicating potentially too-complex code, or is it explaining whys?
- In the "Lessons Learned" section, it's mentioned that other reviewers were not as impressed with Haskell. I'm curious if their reactions were included in the evaluation - to me, these reactions would reduce the success for the understandability (and learnability?) criterion. The paper authors seem to have written this off as "If functional languages are to become more widely used, various sociological and psychological barriers must be overcome".
For the "suspicious" people, this seems to imply the code was final:
> It is significant that [people] were all surprised and suspicious when we told them that Haskell prototype P1 (see appendix B) is a complete tested executable program.
For the people critiquing "cleverness", that seems completely valid whether or not it's actual code or pseudocode.
Some thoughts on the experiment:
- To get a better idea of the impact of the language on authors' thought processes, it'd probably have to include submissions from more authors in each language. With just one (or so) submission per language, I could see there being variation in expertise.
- I'm curious to see what the documentation looks like here, that there's so much written in some of the submissions, and that the paper authors value it so highly. Is it used to explain what the code does, indicating potentially too-complex code, or is it explaining whys?
- In the "Lessons Learned" section, it's mentioned that other reviewers were not as impressed with Haskell. I'm curious if their reactions were included in the evaluation - to me, these reactions would reduce the success for the understandability (and learnability?) criterion. The paper authors seem to have written this off as "If functional languages are to become more widely used, various sociological and psychological barriers must be overcome".