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."

Comments

Honorable Mention

[Ukab the Great]

Brainfuck

Re:Honorable Mention

[El_Muerte_TDS]

I have never heard of a large scale production problem happening in a application written in brainfuck. So by that metric it is not really error prone.

Re:The actual problem languages

[Anne Thwacks]

1) Javascript
2) C++
3) PHP
4) Javascript-based fameworks
5) Anything used to write an Excel or Word macro by the HR department

This is an unfair comparison: PHP specifically targets producing buggy products, and in the unlikely event that an HR compartment gets anything to work, it is even more unlikely to involve a computer.