Many newer programming languages claim to offer higher productivity than old standbys, but hard data on that productivity can be tough to find. However, a new database of 6,000 projects run by the non-profit ISBSG is allowing researchers to compare programming languages based on hours per function point. It ranks ten principal programming languages as follows:
- ASP (6.1 hours per function point)
- Visual Basic (8.5 hours per function point)
- Java (10.6 hours per function point)
- SQL (10.8 hours per function point)
- C++ (12.4 hours per function point)
- C (13.0 hours per function point)
- PL/1 (14.2 hours per function point)
- C# (15.5 hours per function point)
- COBOL (16.8 hours per function point)
- ABAP (19.9 hours per function point)