RESUMEN

There's no language suitable for all tasks, and there probably won't ever be one. When choosing a programming language, you have to balance programmer productivity, maintainability, efficiency, portability, tool support, and software and hardware interfaces. Often, one of these factors will shape your decision. In other cases, the choice depends on the productivity you gain from certain language features, such as modularity and type checking, or external factors, such as integrated development environment support. Finally, for some tasks, adopting an existing domain-specific language, building a new one, or using a general-purpose declarative language can be the right choice.

RESUMEN

If we look at the tools we use to convert source code into executable format, we can get an accurate picture of the abstraction level that programmers face during construction and maintenance (where the largest chunk of software development effort takes place). Collecting data from the building of 7,000 application programs showed that most CPU time is spent compiling C and C++ code using tools with roots in the 1970s and 1980s. To see order-of-magnitude productivity improvements, we must raise our code's level of abstraction by adopting more modern technologies such as domain-specific languages, general purpose declarative languages, and executable UML.