Smalltalk’s Proven Productivity
[Updated: November 4, 2017.]
You often hear about Smalltalk’s productivity advantage over other languages such as Java, JavaScript, and Python. Depending on who you talk to, this advantage ranges from 1.5X to 2–5X. In my own experience, for smaller projects, it’s around 3X. This is all anecdotal, of course, but is there actual scientific evidence to back it up? In fact, there is.
According to Namcook Analytics (Table 16), JavaScript is one of the least productive programming languages in the world (measured by “economic productivity” in terms of number of work hours to deliver 1,000 function points):
- C — 26,273
- Fortran — 22,394
- JavaScript — 15,929
- Forth — 14,636
- Haxe — 14,636
- Lisp — 14,636
- C++ — 12,697
- Go — 12,697
- Java — 12,697
- PHP — 12,697
- Python — 12,697
- C# — 12,309
- Dart — 11,620
- F# — 11,312
- Ruby — 11,312
- Erlang — 10,758
- Elixir — 9,845
- Haskell — 9,845
- Julia — 9,465
- Perl — 9,465
- Delphi — 8,289
- Objective-C — 7,848
- Visual Basic — 7,848
- Eiffel — 7,156
- Smalltalk — 6,879
As you can see, Smalltalk easily trumps JavaScript, Java, Python, C#, and Ruby. The interesting thing about this study is that it goes beyond simple coding and programming; it takes the entire software project into consideration, which is what business executives care most about. They want to know the full cost of applications and their complete schedules from requirements through delivery. They also want to know multi-year maintenance and enhancement costs plus total cost of ownership (TCO).
