Because all comparative PL studies are nonsense, including that one.

Look at the experiment methodology described in most of them.

We have something better for evaluating PLs.

> We have something better for evaluating PLs.

Do tell! How do you evaluate empirical claims (about programming languages) without empirical evidence?

Empirical evaluations break down quickly as the complexity of what is being measured increases, so your best bet in doing a study is to focus on one or a few features.

PLs are of course evaluated over time in the market place over time, like any other designed artifact.

I love that report and find it very inspiring (and it gives me an intuition that Haskell has an edge over the other languages), but the methodology is very disappointing:

- The requirements were mostly up to the interpretation of implementors, which more or less decided the scope of their programs.

- All results were self-reported. Even ruling out dishonesty, there are a lot of ways uncontrolled experimenters can report incorrect results.

- Many implementations weren't even runnable.

- No code was run by the reviewers, at all.

I really would love to see a more serious attempt at this experiment (probably with more modern languages).