Revisiting Prechelt’s paper comparing Java, Lisp, C/C++ and scripting languages
I am Ron Garret (f.k.a. Erann Gat), the author of the followup study mentioned in TFA.  I am, frankly, amazed that this work is getting the amount of attention that it is over 20 years after it was published.  I have a couple of comments about this latest critique.<p>&gt; Given that the participants were recruited from internet groups, I doubt that the subjects were monitored in place, which makes me think that the Development time data collected should be taken with a giant grain of salt.<p>&gt; Based on a small study like Garret’s, I find that the premise that Lisp is so great is unwarranted.<p>That&#x27;s a fair criticism.  In my defense I will say that I didn&#x27;t actually claim that Lisp <i>is</i> great, only that it seems plausible that it <i>might</i> offer the development speed and runtime safety advantages of Java and the execution speed of C, and so it is worth paying some attention to it, and maybe doing further studies.  I certainly believed (and continue to believe) that Lisp <i>is</i> great, but I certainly concede that my data didn&#x27;t (and doesn&#x27;t) prove it.  Renato seems to agree:<p>&gt; However, the data does suggest that Lisp is about as productive as the scripting languages of the day and has a speed comparable to C and C++, which is indeed a remarkable achievement.<p>FWIW, my study was a throwaway side-project conducted on the spur of the moment in my spare time.  It was intended more to get people&#x27;s attention and make the case that Lisp ought to be considered alongside Java as an alternative to C than to be a rigorous scientific case for Lisp&#x27;s superiority over Java.  At the time, Lisp was quite a bit more mature than Java, and indeed one could have argued (and indeed could argue today) that Java was an inferior re-invention of many of the ideas that Lisp had pioneered, with automatic memory management being at the top of that list.  I was frustrated that Java was getting all the attention because it was the shiny new thing and Lisp was being ignored because at the time Java actually sucked pretty badly.  (IMHO it sucks pretty badly today too, but that is now a much harder case to make.)<p>In any case, what astonishes me most is that AFAICT no one has ever done a follow-up to either of these studies that was better designed and used more rigorous methods.  Instead, people just seem to keep citing these papers again and again as if squeezing these turnips harder might yield something worthwhile now that could not be extracted from them when they were first published.<p>This is a very fertile field for further research.  Someone should cultivate it.