Re^3: Choosing a Platform

While this is indeed the most measurable decision you can make, it is hardly the most important. I have seen teams argue for months on platform choice. At the same time, they spend zero seconds arguing on the importance of testing, hiring experts, agile process, or the other important issues.

Must be something about the visibility of the platform choice (look he is using Visual Studio!) vs. the non-visibility of the important stuff.

Cannot remember the name of the famous consultant, who has been on many a project, and was asked: what is the most productive platform? His answer: it makes no difference, as long as the team gells arount it, and has a passion for it.

Comment on Re^3: Choosing a Platform

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Re^4: Choosing a Platform by drago99 (Sexton) on Jul 27, 2004 at 16:00 UTC
While this is indeed the most measurable decision you can make, it is hardly the most important. I agree, to a point. We took a task-by-task look at how much code (and therefore how much time) it takes to do 10 common tasks in Java, .NET and Perl. Regex search-n-replace. Read in a file, line by line, storing only the lines that match a regex. Open a recordset and iterate through it. Make an HTTP request. Perform XSLT transformations on XML. Iterate through a hash or other deeply-nested data structure. Sort an array or hash, by keys or values, with your own sorting algorithm. Append variables and static strings. Run another program and collect its STDOUT. Execute part of your program within another thread, or fork off a separate process. When writing a web-based application, these are arguably some of the most common tasks. If each one only takes 1-2 lines of code, or if each one takes 5-10 or 15-20 lines of code, it can make a serious difference in the amount of time it takes to write, and the amount of code you have to maintain. Bugs are more easily identified in less code. That's a pretty important factor to take into account, IMHO.	[reply]

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Re^4: Choosing a Platform
by drago99 (Sexton) on Jul 27, 2004 at 16:00 UTC

While this is indeed the most measurable decision you can make, it is hardly the most important.

I agree, to a point.
We took a task-by-task look at how much code (and therefore how much time) it takes to do 10 common tasks in Java, .NET and Perl.

Regex search-n-replace.
Read in a file, line by line, storing only the lines that match a regex.
Open a recordset and iterate through it.
Make an HTTP request.
Perform XSLT transformations on XML.
Iterate through a hash or other deeply-nested data structure.
Sort an array or hash, by keys or values, with your own sorting algorithm.
Append variables and static strings.
Run another program and collect its STDOUT.
Execute part of your program within another thread, or fork off a separate process.

When writing a web-based application, these are arguably some of the most common tasks. If each one only takes 1-2 lines of code, or if each one takes 5-10 or 15-20 lines of code, it can make a serious difference in the amount of time it takes to write, and the amount of code you have to maintain.

Bugs are more easily identified in less code. That's a pretty important factor to take into account, IMHO.

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