Without actually checking my copy of "The Mythical Man-Month" (everybody reading this should really have a copy readily available), there was a chapter in which Brooks looked at productivity by lines written. The interesting point, to him, was not the actual number of lines written per day, but the fact that it seemed to be roughly the same in assembler and in PL/I (I think that was the higher-level language used).

Brooks wasn't about to throw out some sort of arbitrary figure of productivity, but he was working from data on real projects, and for all I can remember they might have been 12 lines/day on the average.

He did point out that productivity could be expected to vary. He said that compilers were three times as hard as application programs, and operating systems three times as hard as compilers. (He seems to have liked using multipliers of three to separate categories.)

I don't know if he appreciated then the individual differences between programmer productivity (although in an order-of-magnitude argument he did postulate a factor of seven difference), but as we know superior productivity isn't just a matter of writing more code, but also writing the right code to do the job.

There's also the question of the environment. Brooks speculated a bit about what would make developers faster or slower. Like lots of people, he questioned whether the current fads (interactive debugging using time-sharing systems) were any better than the old ways (careful preplanning for a two-hour shot using the whole machine).

Given that, I would disregard any actual productivity number he came up with as useless; the continuing value of the book is in the principles and more general lessons that people persist in not learning. (Hey, if everybody had learned them, the book would be of historical interest only, much like all of Freud's arguments that there is something like a subconscious mind.)