[Qem]

> There's some study where Smalltalk came out as the most productive language, I don't know whether it's more productive but that kind of interactive development where you build up your program evaluating it the whole time, without ever restarting, is a lot of fun.

I think it's this paper: https://www.ifpug.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IYSM.-Thirt...

[igouy]

Which seems to be a proprietary venture without any transparency into the kinds of task that were undertaken or the software development tools chosen. For example, what were the comparable tasks undertaken with "HTML" and "Machine language"?

Presumably the differences between "GW Basic", "Basic (interpreted)", "Quick Basic", "Visual Basic" ("Excel" Visual Basic for Applications?) follow from differences between the software development tools provided with the different language implementations.

So shouldn't we expect wildly different results between Java + plain text editor and Java + IntelliJ IDEA?

But there's only some kind-of generic place-holder "Java".