Fernando J. Corbató: Language

Fernando J. Corbató was American computer scientist. Explore interesting quotes on language.

Fernando J. Corbató: 22 quotes 0 likes

“The use of the high level language made each programmer a factor of 5 to 10 more productive in a coding sense and more concerned with the semantics than the syntax of modules.”

Fernando J. Corbató

"A Managerial View of the Multics System Development" (1978)

Sense

“Clearly, one can obfuscate one's ideas with a compiler language but it's harder. To some extent one is talking about what one wants rather than how one wants to do it. The trouble with machine code, of course, is that when you look at a random section of machine code you don't know what properties of the instructions the programmer really wanted to exploit.”

Fernando J. Corbató

"PL/I as a Tool for System Programming" http://web.archive.org/web/20080206153039/http://home.nycap.rr.com/pflass/PLI/plisprg.html, Datamation, 15 (5), 6 May 1969, pp. 68–76

Idea

“Regardless of whether one is dealing with assembly language or compiler language, the number of debugged lines of source code per day is about the same!”

Fernando J. Corbató

"PL/I as a Tool for System Programming", Datamation, 15 (5), 6 May 1969, pp. 68–76. This has been paraphrased variously by others as Corbató's Law:
Productivity and reliability depend on the length of a program’s text, independent of language level used.
Albert Endres, H. Dieter Rombach, A Handbook of Software and Systems Engineering: Empirical Observations, Laws and Theories (2003), ISBN 0321154207, p. 72
The number of lines of code a programmer can write in a fixed period of time is the same independent of the language used.
[citation needed]