On the Impact of Programming Languages on Code Quality

...deleted

I skimmed the paper. I misunderstood the results.

Maybe off topic, but isn't the language in the abstract a bit aggressive?

I mean, this type of study is somewhat open to interpretation. It's not like everyone should arrive to the exact same numbers..

(Edited-- I was reading the original paper, which showed good results for TypeScript; the new paper linked above refutes that result. My mistake. Thanks to the posters who corrected me!)

The winners in this paper are Clojure, Haskell, Scala.

I look forward to seeing Rust added. The authors go into substantial detail about what they consider errors, and in my personal experience Rust solves many of them. See e.g. "Some defect type like memory error, concurrency errors also depend on language primitives."

This is great (to see something I know about on HN). As an undergrad at UMass (where Emery Berger teaches), I remember the exact paper they are talking about, and how it was presented at UMass (this was part of a lunch and learn with the faculty, grad, and undergrad students and the author of the original paper).

I remember Emery being quite confused at the methodology in the paper, and he was very confused with one aspect of it, which was how they came to conclude that C was more bug prone (something about void * being able to cast to everything? It was a while ago...)

Glad to see he wrote a rebuttal, a little awkward watching a professor debate with the paper's author :)

Of note is that these are all associations. It's possible the associations are all due to selection effects (or even that the "better" language are actually worse but their effects are reversed by selecting for programmers who are better).

In the early days of Python, some employers used it as a way to filter for candidates who were ahead of the curve. I believe Paul Graham mentioned Lisp being good for attracting better programmers, although I can't find the reference anymore [1]. If there's any value in this kind of filter, the effects will show up in the programmers' output.

1. I'm having a hard time finding references for these assertions; the best I've found is some Reddit posts and Joel Spolsky's post on finding great developers: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/06/finding-great-deve...