
"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.
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