Is it not so that development time is always maxed out automatically? Programmers improve the system as far as they can, and the study explicitly says that it did not address "design time, readability or maintenance time". Since software is almost never perfect (unless constructed with proofs, and you can make optimizations even there), I would think that programming time depends on the programmer's willingness to invest yet more time into its features - and this willingness is most likely not related to the language in use, but rather to financial or temporal constraints. Am I missing something?