Comment Re:Wrong question (Score 1) 634
FORTRAN and Lisp (and BASIC and C, only somewhat later) made programmers about as productive, within a reasonably small constant factor, as anything since.
I recently switched from C to Python, and my productivity shot up ~100 times. For example, I created a tree of hashes to perform pattern matching on large data sets in linear time. It took me 2 hours from concept to production run. Also factor in a huge library that does everything needed on this planet, ease of maintaining 100x fewer lines of code and 0 memory management hurdles.
The downside is that it runs 100 times slower than C, but since it is the programmer's productivity your are talking about, you are very wrong.