An empirical comparison of C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Rexx, and Tcl for a search/string-processing program

80 implementations of the same set of requirements, created by 74 different programmers in various languages, are compared for several properties, such as run time, memory consumption, source text length, comment density, program structure, reliability, and the amount of effort required for writing them. The results indicate that, for the given programming problem, ``scripting languages'' (Perl, Python, Rexx, Tcl) are more productive than conventional languages. In terms of run time and memory consumption, they often turn out better than Java and not much worse than C or C++. In general, the differences between languages tend to be smaller than the typical differences due to different programmers within the same language.