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From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: The joy of FORTRAN
Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2025 20:50:40 -0000 (UTC)
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On Fri, 28 Feb 2025 12:42:57 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:

> I used to be able to crank out assembler mostly as fast as I could write
> (or type), with some thought required for the tricky bits. C is not
> really faster for me to write, or wasn’t when I was doing a bunch of
> it. 

But a line of C typically does a whole lot more than a line of assembler. 
That is where the productivity gain comes from.

Fred Brooks, author of the classic “The Mythical Man-Month”, worked this 
out years ago: once a code base reaches a certain size, your typical 
experienced programmer, familiar with the project, is only able to 
contribute about ten lines of reasonably-debugged code per day. And that 
applies across a whole range of different languages.

This is why very-high-level languages, which can do a whole lot more in a 
single line of code, offer greater productivity than assembler.