Copyright © 2011 Andrea Ellero and Paola Pellegrini. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The selection of the computer language to adopt is usually driven by intuition and expertise, since it is very diffcult to compare languages taking into account all their characteristics. In this paper, we analyze the effciency of programming languages through Data Envelopment Analysis. We collected the input data from The Computer Language Benchmarks Game: we consider a large set of languages in terms of computational time, memory usage, and source code size. Various benchmark problems are tackled. We analyze the results first of all considering programming languages individually. Then, we evaluate families of them sharing some characteristics, for example, being compiled or interpreted.