All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Productivity

ziggy on 2002-11-12T21:00:24

Tony Bowden picked up this gem of a citation in the ACM Digital Library. (If he keeps this up, I may need to renew my ACM membership...)

The passage that Tony cites deals with what "programmer productivity" means. It was taken from a paper presented at APL 99 from the author of the Zark Library of Utility Functions. With a search term like that, google returns a very focused result set. :-) Most of the results point to the ACM Digital Library citation, but this one contains a summary of the author's plenary address to the APL 99 conference, where he addresses 14 myths about APL, including:

  • APL is Unreadable
    “You know what, Russian is unreadable, I don’t know Russian, so it’s unreadable. If you don’t know it, it’s unreadable.”
  • APL is Unmaintainable
    Because APL is unreadable, it’s a write-only language, hence is unmaintainable.
  • Avoided re-inventing the wheel
    “If we did not re-invent the wheel this would be a Cobol conference, we would have leeches all over our bodies, we would be using 8-track tapes.”

    You should always be re-examining the wheel.

The full summary is quite inciteful. Especially the discussion about The Bergquist Equation of Productivity.