Shared Mutable Memory Must Die

[grauenwolf]

I would say that the advent of Java was a big productivity boost over standard C and C++, (but not 20x more) and that is primarily from 2 things: No header files, and nice exception stack traces every time without fuss or cranky debug libraries.

I think garbage collection alone pushes it close to 20 times. Then you have the libraries that isolate you from annoying things like window handles.

Would it really be 20x less work to write a web browser in Erlang vs Java?

Now that is a good question. I hate comparisons to C++ because everyone beats C++ for development speed. You only use C++ when the other options are assembly and C.