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

Re: In before Fractal of Bad Design

[_merlin]

Pascal and ANSI C are very similar, but pre-ANSI C is a completely different beast, far more similar to BCPL. In fact, ANSI C could almost be described as Pascal with C syntax.

Pre-ANSI C didn't have prototypes - it assumed any undeclared name was an external function. It didn't automatically convert int to long if the function expected it, etc. - you had to explicitly cast. You had to be careful to cast results of functions correctly, too. All it had was a set of rules for how argument types were stacked, and it was up to you not to pass something a function wasn't expecting. This is closer to assembly language programming than Pascal or ANSI C.

Re: In before Fractal of Bad Design

[Anne Thwacks]

Assembly to C was quite easy as well.

Which is hardly surprising, since C is just PDP11 assembler tidied up a bit.

Which is interesting considering the PDP11 was "a hardware Fortran machine", and the i386 architecture is a close copy of the PDP11 - the 286 even copied the early (variable page size) PDP11 memory management scheme that was the fashion before people figured out it was not really good for virtual memory, and then the 386 copied the later (fixed page size) PDP11 MM which is needed for virtual page based memory. The PDP11 was designed on the assumption that memory bandwidth was the bottleneck in throughput.

The fact that C has been successfully ported to almost all more recent processors is largely because the concepts of what a CPU is and does have been developed by people who grew up on the PDP11 architecture. RISC architecture may be different, but, in reality, the RISC architecture is mostly just used to simulate CISC anyway. RISC was designed on the assumption that instruction decode was the bottleneck - which has not really been the case since the 1980's - hence the failure of RISC to displace CISC.

I am writing this on a Sparc64 (RISC) machine - the story is more complex that I describe here.

Re: In before Fractal of Bad Design

[imnotanumber]

So you are saying that the years since BWK wrote that article have given us even more reasons to dislike Pascal, such as the fact that the only versions that are useful are either dead for 20+ years (Turbo Pascal) or need vendor-proprietary extensions (Delphi)?

No. You have fallen prey to the common hype.

There is, the GCC of Pascal world, that is Free Pascal https://www.freepascal.org/ : an Open Source version with a modern syntax and concepts. The complaints on the article seem someone complaining about Linux arguing that you have to compile the Kernel to add mouse support.

Also, Lazarus https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ is a modern Open Source IDE that picked where Delphi stop and you can develop and compile applications for Windows, Linux and OSX.