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Which Programming Languages Are Most Prone to Bugs? (i-programmer.info)

An anonymous reader writes: The i-Programmer site revisits one of its top stories of 2017, about researchers who used data from GitHub for a large-scale empirical investigation into static typing versus dynamic typing. The team investigated 20 programming languages, using GitHub code repositories for the top 50 projects written in each language, examing 18 years of code involving 29,000 different developers, 1.57 million commits, and 564,625 bug fixes.

The results? "The languages with the strongest positive coefficients - meaning associated with a greater number of defect fixes are C++, C, and Objective-C, also PHP and Python. On the other hand, Clojure, Haskell, Ruby and Scala all have significant negative coefficients implying that these languages are less likely than average to result in defect fixing commits."

Or, in the researcher's words, "Language design does have a significant, but modest effect on software quality. Most notably, it does appear that disallowing type confusion is modestly better than allowing it, and among functional languages static typing is also somewhat better than dynamic typing."

1 of 247 comments (clear)

  1. Languages aren't error prone. Programmers are by aglider · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    The base concept is bulls**it on its own.

    It's more like spoken or written human languages to me:
    You need to study, learn and practice before being proficient.

    If you think that you need a fast solution, then the language you know the best is among the right solutions.
    Assembly isn't more error prone than English.
    It just depends whether you are or not an idiotic programmer or a easy-going speaker.

    --
    Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.