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A variety of debates ensue during discussions whether a given programming language is “the right tool for the job" and while some of these debates may appear to be tinged with an almost religious fervor, most people would agree that a programming language can impact not only the coding process, but also the properties of the resulting product. Now computer scientists at the University of California - Davis have published a study of the effect of programming languages on software quality using a very large data set from GitHub that analyzed 729 projects with 80 Million SLOC by 29,000 authors and 1.5 million commits in 17 languages. The large sample size allowed them to use a mixed-methods approach, combining multiple regression modeling with visualization and text analytics, to study the effect of language features such as static vs. dynamic typing, strong vs. weak typing on software quality. By triangulating findings from different methods, and controlling for confounding effects such as team size, project size, and project history, they report that language design does have a significant, but modest effect on software quality.
Most notably, it does appear that strong typing is modestly better than weak typing, and among functional languages, static typing is also somewhat better than dynamic typing. We also find that functional languages are somewhat better than procedural languages. It is worth noting that these modest effects arising from language design are overwhelm- ingly dominated by the process factors such as project size, team size, and commit size. However, we hasten to caution the reader that even these modest effects might quite possibly be due to other, intangible process factors, e.g., the preference of certain personality types for functional, static and strongly typed languages.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Sir Garlon on Thursday November 06 2014, @01:23PM
But to write truly hideous code takes dedication and talent!
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Thursday November 06 2014, @02:32PM
Real programmers can write FORTRAN in any language...
(Score: 1) by GeminiDomino on Thursday November 06 2014, @02:33PM
And PHP.
Even VB6 couldn't come up with some of the horrible crimes against determinism that I've seen in PHP.
"We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of our culture"
(Score: 2) by Marand on Friday November 07 2014, @03:35AM
But to write truly hideous code takes dedication and talent!
Or a text editor and perl :)
(disclaimer: I actually like Perl and have used it since the 90s, but I'd have to be a fool to deny that Perl makes it extremely easy to make some truly frightening, unreadable code)