Smalltalk’s Productivity
The notion of the function point metric is explained in [1]: &quot;the amount of business functionality an information system (as a product) provides to a user&quot;.  The IFPUG report in the article explains it further and also mentions the inaccuracies across different variations of that metric [2].<p>As a Smalltalk programmer I certainly agree with having an increased productivity when programming in Smalltalk. But in my opinion this does depend less on the language and much more on the development environment. Having worked with multiple Smalltalk-like environments for JavaScript I can (anecdotally) report the same kind of productivity for programming in JS.<p>I think the right tooling around a PL influence productivity a lot, maybe even more than the language itself. Of course, certain tooling features depend on meta interfaces of the programming language and its runtime.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Function_point" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Function_point</a><p>[2] page 9, <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ifpug.org&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2017&#x2F;04&#x2F;IYSM.-Thirty-years-of-IFPUG.-Software-Economics-and-Function-Point-Metrics-Capers-Jones.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ifpug.org&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2017&#x2F;04&#x2F;IYSM.-Thirty...</a>