Hard evidence that some coding lingo encourage flaws remains elusive
Tempting through it may be to believe that certain programming languages promote errors, recent research finds little if any evidence of that.
A scholarly paper, » A Large Scale Study of Programming Languages and Code Quality in Github,» presented at the 2014 Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE) conference, made that claim that some computer languages show higher levels of buggy code, setting off a firestorm of developer comment.
The paper, by UC Davis computer scientists Baishakhi Ray, Daryl Posnett, Vladimir Filkov, and Premkumar Devanbu, says, among other things, that code written in C, C++, Objective-C, JavaScript, PHP and Python tends to have more bugs than code in other languages.
So, computer science boffins from University of Massachusetts Amherst, Northeastern University, and Czech Technical University in Prague tried to replicate the study.
In a paper distributed via ArXiv this week, titled » On the Impact of Programming Languages on Code Quality,» Emery Berger, Celeste Hollenbeck, Petr Maj, Olga Vitek and Jan Vitek revisit the four major findings of the 2014 paper to evaluate the assumption that programming language design matters.
They found no evidence of that. Their attempt to reproduce the 2014 research mostly failed. Their analysis indicates that flaws show up in C++ code just a bit more often than they should, but even that they say is statistically insignificant.
In a phone interview with The Register, Emery Berger, computer science professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said it’s important to draw a distinction between what a failure to reproduce means and what’s the actual state of affairs.
