ABSTRACT
The influence of programming languages on productivity is inversely related to application size. As of 2016, there are more than 3,000 programming languages in existence and new languages keep appearing at rates of more than one language every month! Why the software industry has so many programming languages is a sociological mystery. The existence of 3,000 programming languages is a proof that none of them are fully adequate, or otherwise that language would dominate the world's software projects. Instead we have large numbers of specialized languages that are more or less optimized for certain kinds of applications, but no very good for other kinds of applications. Many older languages are orphans and have no working compilers and no active programmers. For large systems in the 10,000 function point size range, coding is only about 30" of total effort and other activities such as finding and fixing bugs and producing paper documents dilute the impact of pure coding.
