On the Impact of Programming Languages on Code Quality

Post by syastrov » Wed, Jun 05, 2019, 7:28 PM UTC

tabtab wrote: post #33

ggregoire wrote: post #32

Casual observation: adding a framework to any language seems to improve the overall code quality. It adds and teaches structure, patterns and good practices that developers usually follow. I've seen terrible codebases written in vanilla PHP, JavaScript, Python (probably the worst ones). But I've seen very good looking, easy to understand, easy to maintain codebases written in Symfony, React and Django. (React is an i…

I agree. Our framework, libraries, and/or interfaces can and should make a bigger difference than programming language. If you have to use the "weird parts" of a language to get typical work done, you are doing something wrong. And if you are not using the weird parts, then programming languages look and do pretty much the same thing. Braggings such as, "look! My language can do double recursive lambda backflips whil…

Post by igouy » Wed, Jun 05, 2019, 7:33 PM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #59

robbrit wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they're forced to do this Figuratively speaking. None of the languages they test enforce any unit testing. What I'm suggesting is that since the Ruby community tends to be more obsessive about testing, that might lead to an improvement in code quality when comparing against other similar languages like PHP or JS which are less obsessive about testing. It's something you might have to control for to see the impact.…

Figuratively speaking. None of the languages they test enforce any unit testing. The trivial type-mistake "Unhandled Exceptions" in Smalltalk would leak out more often than was comfortable, if the project didn't have a good means of testing to catch those. I suspect that has something to do with the Ruby community being more obsessive about testing.

Post by mcguire » Wed, Jun 05, 2019, 7:37 PM UTC

robbrit wrote: post #46

Seems like they're just doing associations, and not controlling for a lot of factors. For example, you can come up with some narratives to explain a lot of these findings: * Python, JS, PHP, Java, C++ are all very common first languages; I'd imagine the average experience level for these is dragged down a bit compared to others like Golang, Haskell, or Scala. One of the recent Stack Overflow Developer surveys found G…

Post by sidlls » Wed, Jun 05, 2019, 7:43 PM UTC

msluyter wrote: post #31

idoubtit wrote: post #12

My own take of this: - This study tries to enhance the original work by better metrics (e.g. confusion with C/C++), using better statistics (e.g. uncertainty). - Automatically evaluating the quality of a code is hard and time-consuming. They had to use peer review of labellisation. - Most of the old claims are not confirmed. - Only 2 languages in this study had both a significant impact (impact coeff) and enough fiab…

"... and there may be other influencing factors." Selection bias? Consider the type of person likely to be attracted to languages like Haskell or Clojure. (Note, didn't read the original study so I don't know the selection criteria. Were code samples in different languages from the same programmers compared, or were there different sets of programmers per language? My comment really only applies to the latter case.)

Post by sidlls » Wed, Jun 05, 2019, 7:44 PM UTC

idoubtit wrote: post #12

My own take of this: - This study tries to enhance the original work by better metrics (e.g. confusion with C/C++), using better statistics (e.g. uncertainty). - Automatically evaluating the quality of a code is hard and time-consuming. They had to use peer review of labellisation. - Most of the old claims are not confirmed. - Only 2 languages in this study had both a significant impact (impact coeff) and enough fiab…