[Haskell] The speed, size and dependability of programming languages

Casey Hawthorne caseyh at istar.ca
Mon Jun 1 14:40:15 EDT 2009


Instead of GZip metrics for code size, maybe a good measure of
imperative language code size would be the "cyclomatic complexity"
metric.

It would also be interesting to see results for Fortran, Java, C++,
etc. across a range of old and newer compilers.


Can one measure "cyclomatic complexity" for functional languages?


However:

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_metric

Modern software development practitioners are likely to point out that
naive and simplistic metrics can cause more harm than good.


ALSO: one is often more interested in "Software Quality" factors

    * 4.1.1 Understandability
    * 4.1.2 Completeness
    * 4.1.3 Conciseness
    * 4.1.4 Portability
    * 4.1.5 Consistency
    * 4.1.6 Maintainability
    * 4.1.7 Testability
    * 4.1.8 Usability
    * 4.1.9 Reliability
    * 4.1.10 Structuredness
    * 4.1.11 Efficiency
    * 4.1.12 Security

Which seem only to be qualitatively "metricable" and not
quantitatively "metricable".


Benchmarks of any type only seem to be applicable to your program if
your program is fairly similar to the benchmark.


--
Regards,
Casey


More information about the Haskell mailing list