Learning Curves for Different Programming Languages

Post by codygman » Sat, Dec 27, 2014, 8:39 PM UTC

dllthomas wrote: post #170

codygman wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm productive in Haskell and I don't know category theory. I didn't "learn" monads specifically, I used them in my projects and gained an intuition for monads followed by memorizing the 3 monad laws.

What distinction are you making between "learning monads" and "gaining an intuition for monads and memorizing the 3 monad laws"?

Post by imanaccount247 » Sat, Dec 27, 2014, 9:15 PM UTC

zapt02 wrote: post #95

imanaccount247 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PHP is full of problems that lead directly to security vulnerabilities if you aren't constantly aware of them and very careful when writing your code. So when someone who doesn't know those problems (most people) "hacks together" something that "just works", it is almost always providing a backdoor into that server. Once you do learn a little, you find that every scripting language is just as easy to work with as PHP…

Does Perl, Python or Ruby have built-in automatic escaping and sanitization? I would not call PHP less safe than any of these languages. On top of that all three of those languages require additional setup. (Especially Ruby with RoR shudder )

Post by logicallee » Sat, Dec 27, 2014, 9:23 PM UTC

phamilton wrote: post #169

logicallee wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your parent is referring to the fact that the Productivity graphed for PHP is the worst of all the languages, even at t=0 (except Haskell, which is shown as starting out with 0 productivity for a while.) I also strongly disagreed with that for the same reason your parent comment did. The self-assessment bar is funny, but hte blue (productivity) graph needs to be way higher.

There's no absolute scale, so you can't make comparisons between the graphs. The only conclusions you can make from the PHP scale is 1) that (according to the author) PHP developers think they are a lot more productive than they actually are and 2) experience doesn't increase productivity substantially in PHP.

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Dec 27, 2014, 9:31 PM UTC

phamilton wrote: post #151

rebootthesystem wrote: post #137

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I'll take another tack and suggest that productivity today is more a function of what libraries might be available rather than language choice. A language like Python has a massive number of really good libraries spanning a range of disciplines. Is it the "best" language (whatever that means)? Don't know. Don't care. You can get the job done and the ecosystem is huge. I am not comparing Python to Haskell or anything…

The graphs are not productivity vs language choice. They are productivity vs experience in a given language. In languages with strong libraries, I'd expect a diminished benefit from experience. 10 years python experience doesn't make you much more productive in standing up a django application vs someone with 1 year of experience. Thus, the curve for python might very well be quite flat (since you start fairly high t…

Post by phamilton » Sat, Dec 27, 2014, 9:48 PM UTC

logicallee wrote: post #175

phamilton wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no absolute scale, so you can't make comparisons between the graphs. The only conclusions you can make from the PHP scale is 1) that (according to the author) PHP developers think they are a lot more productive than they actually are and 2) experience doesn't increase productivity substantially in PHP.

what makes you think the graphs aren't meant to be read on the same scale? By that reading the PHP productivity line could be 100x higher than the next-best language listed, but with self-assessment being 1000x higher than the next-best language listed. That is not a very sensible reading.