[gambit-list] Post: Compare the productivity of computer languages

Junia Magellan junnia at gmail.com
Thu Oct 17 09:49:52 EDT 2013


Dear list members,

I am the main investigator of a group that is carrying out an
experiment, which  compares the productivity of computer languages.
For instance, one may wish to see if a Python programmer is more
productive than a Scheme programmer with the same ability.

Here is the spoiler: The volunteers associated with the project were
not able to run sqlite3 from Gambit. It seems that the bindings are
old, or not well documented. I would appreciate a link to bindings
that work out of the box, is the case of both Bigloo and Racket.

We therefore need to put in place a measurement theory that provides
for the programmer's ability. In this case one can be sure of an equal
ability to that of a Scheme programmer. [The research group is
working with the following languages: C, Java, C#, Common Lisp SBCL)
and Scheme (Racket and Bigloo).]

To measure a programmer's ability, the group uses the Rasch model.
The same model is also used for measuring the ability of a computer
language to increase a programmer's productivity.

For the time being, the group is working with the above cited
languages.  If the reader is unfamiliar with measurement theory, she
is invited to visit my page concerning the subject:
strues.org/languages

Although the page contains original ideas from members of the my
research group, it should be noted that there are however mathematical
patches borrowed from other researchers, such as Rasch. This lack of
originality is in itself not a problem as the page has been
constructed purely as an  internal report. Of course, in the final
paper, due credit will be given through appropriate citations.

To everybody's surprise, Python has not shown itself as being the most
productive language, while Scheme has, followed closely by sbcl.
Python occupies a distant third place.

The volunteers are using Racket and Bigloo to program in Scheme. The
fact is that everybody found Gambit difficult to use to solve the kind
of problems associated with the measurement items. Therefore, nobody
is using Gambit.

The first difficulty with Gambit is that it does not run out of the
box in all hosting services. A member of the group tried to fix the
issue by  consulting this list, but was not successful. Finally, the
problem was solved after consulting Manuel Serrano and a member of the
Racket user list.
So a volunteer has installed a simple Gambit powered page on Hostgator.
We would like thank Manuel Serrano and André for helping us with this task.

The other difficult concerns connections to an sql server, while
Bigloo and Racket provide out of the box connections, Gambit requires
installation of external libraries and bindings to sqlite3, for
example, Twenty three volunteers tried to perform the installation and
everybody failed.

Does anybody on this list know where I can find sources of gsi with
sqlite3? As I would like to generate gsi with sqlite3 included, as in Racket.

By the way, I am insisting on adding Gambit to the Scheme compiler set
used in the experiment, because Gambit has a nice optional
infix syntax. I would like to check whether this alters my results.



 * Junia Magellan*

Doutoranda em Inteligência Artificial - Engenharia Elétrica - UFU
Mestre em Inteligência Artificial - Ciência da Computação - UFU

Docente do IFTM - Campus Avançado Patrocínio

Lattes: http://lattes.cnpq.br/3659680417351721
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