Do Programming Languages Affect Productivity? A Case Study Using Data from Open Source Projects

Brooks and others long ago suggested that on aver-age computer programmers write the same number of lines of code in a given amount of time regardless of the programming language used. We examine data col-lected from the CVS repositories of 9,999 open source projects hosted on SourceForge.net to test this assump-tion for 10 of the most popular programming languages in use in the open source community. We find that for 24 of the 45 pairwise comparisons, the programming language is a significant factor in determining the rate at which source code is written, even after accounting for variations between programmers and projects.