Code Complete referenced studies saying that programmers write about the same number of lines per day, no matter what the language is. It follows that more concise languages really do translate into faster development.
Thanks for the pointer. I appreciate it. I am going to try digging up the reference.
I find it hard to believe though. Beyond the code reading challenges that developers have had, I have seen highly varying productivity in code bases that have different amounts of 'brittleness' (and code cycles). On some codebases developers even after understanding what is going on and understanding the change that needs to happen, developers can very easily spend hours making sure a line of code will actually work in different situations.
Idiomatic clojure does several things to improve matters, like minimizing mutable state, wrapping the remaining mutable state in good concurrency structures, and emphasizing constructs like map and reduce instead of manually looping.
