“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!”

"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]

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Regardless of whether one is dealing with assembly language or compiler language, the number of debugged lines of sourc…" by Fernando J. Corbató?
Fernando J. Corbató photo
Fernando J. Corbató 11
American computer scientist 1926–2019

Related quotes

Larry Wall photo

“Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

[8571@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV, 1990]
Usenet postings, 1990

Paul Graham photo
Richard Stallman photo

“The hard part of programming is the same regardless of the language.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

"You broke the Internet. We're making ourselves a GNU one." (August 2013) https://gnunet.org/internetistschuld (around 02:16)
2010s
Context: Programming is programming. If you get good at programming, it doesn't matter which language you learned it in, because you'll be able to do programming in any language. The hard part of programming is the same regardless of the language. And if you have a talent for that, and you learned it here, you can take it over there. Oh, one thing: if you want to get a picture of a programming at its most powerful, you should learn Lisp or Scheme because they are more elegant and powerful than other languages.

Dennis M. Ritchie photo

“[C has] the power of assembly language and the convenience of … assembly language.”

Dennis M. Ritchie (1941–2011) American computer scientist

Quoted in Cade Metz, "Dennis Ritchie: The Shoulders Steve Jobs Stood On", http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2011/10/thedennisritchieeffect/ Wired, 13 October 2011.

Fernando J. Corbató photo

“One united people, regardless of race, language or religion.”

Sinnathamby Rajaratnam (1915–2006) Early life

Rajaratnam penned the Singapore National Pledge in 1966.

Newton Lee photo
Marshall McLuhan photo

“Today, computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code or language into any other code or language.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 80

“…yucky assembly language mucky-muck.”

Paul DiLascia (1959–2008) American software developer

About language

Related topics