Foot in mouth disease

[Derek Thomson]

GerritM wrote:
> "Derek Thomson" <derek at wedgetail.com> schreef in bericht
> news:3dc3dc4e$0$12762$afc38c87 at news.optusnet.com.au...
> <...snip...>
> 
>>Then there's the fact that it takes between 5-10 lines of Java to do the
>>same thing in Python, depending on what you're doing. Having a very high
>>level language, as opposed to a high level one, definitely helps
>>refactoring in that there's much less code to refactor. Look at the size
>>of Fnorb (*), compared to Java ORBs. Or just look at the size of the
>>Fnorb IDL compiler ... and it's even readable. I know which I'd like to
>>be refactoring.
>>
>>(*) http://fnorb.org
>>
> 
> <...snip...>
> Do you by any means have the data at hand (kloc's for Java, kloc's for
> comparable Python; ORB and/or IDL compiler)? I am highly interested in any
> substantiated evidence with respect to language efficiency/expressiveness.

Nope, I was just replying based on my feelings for an average task, 
which was the tone of the OP. Think about how difficult it is to do the 
equivalent of a list slice assigment in Java, for example.

For some harder numbers, I compared JacORB (a Java ORB) to Fnorb (a 
Python ORB), and Fnorb is about one half the lines of code of JacORB, 
just for the core ORB itself.

Now, that's for an ORB, which is low level enough (marshalling and 
unmarshalling data on-the-wire, and connection management), that it 
doesn't play too well to Python's expressiveness. But still, that's 
quite a difference.

As the application becomes higher level, I'd expect the gains to be much 
greater.

--
D.