On the Impact of Programming Languages on Code Quality · HackerPapers discussions

On the Impact of Programming Languages on Code Quality — HN submission

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 15:27:45 GMT

Impact of Programming Languages on Code Quality (2019)

1 point; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

On the Impact of Programming Languages on Code Quality — mentioned by DeadEarnest

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 11:02:44 GMT

If we approach the question as engineers, scientifically, with numbers and studies, not anecdotes and hand-waving, then Clojure is hands down the best language in terms of productivity and bug reduction. To this day, I know of no study that was able to demonstrate superiority of statically-typed languages - [1]. What studies clearly show, is that both in terms of productivity [2] and bug reduction [3], expressivity reigns supreme. And Clojure is the most expressive [4] out of languages that can leverage huge ecosystems (Java and JS, soon C++ through Jank dialect). [1]…

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On the Impact of Programming Languages on Code Quality — mentioned by TheDong

Fri, 12 May 2023 08:03:24 GMT

> all methodologies have tradeoff's go and clojure sit near the bottom of this list in bugs/committ: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.10220.pdf You have linked a study which, if you read the abstract, effectively claims "we tried to reproduce a study about bugs-by-programming-language, and could not. We have concluded their methodology was flawed". I can't find information in your linked source that support anything about type-system complexity resulting in more bugs. > But if go has so many problems why do people use it? If candy is bad for your health, why do people eat it? Surely people eating…

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On the Impact of Programming Languages on Code Quality — mentioned by zbobet2012

Fri, 12 May 2023 06:17:59 GMT

> Do you have any info on this? There have been some studies, and while all methodologies have tradeoff's go and clojure sit near the bottom of this list in bugs/committ: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.10220.pdf Which is fascinating because they are very different languages whose unifying theme is simplicity. But this actually fits well if you know another important fact: bugs occur along organizational lines. https://augustl.com/blog/2019/best_bug_predictor_is_organiza... If you've been around long enough, you realize a lot, if not most bugs, come from not understanding someone else's code. Type…

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On the Impact of Programming Languages on Code Quality — mentioned by klodolph

Thu, 26 May 2022 18:39:52 GMT

There's a speculation in the first citation: > Python is not maintanable above 50k to 100k lines of code and because of that people consider this code bases very large Note that this is a speculation, not a conclusion, the article is not very thorough, and LOC is mostly used because it is convenient to measure, not because it is what we are trying to measure. I'd personally consider 50k a "medium" code base, and 10k is "small". > Worth keeping in mind a that a Python program will be about half the LOC of a Java program doing the same thing. LOC is a confounding variable. > Bugs are also…

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On the Impact of Programming Languages on Code Quality — mentioned by tsimionescu

Sat, 26 Jun 2021 13:17:49 GMT

First of all, I am arguing for the base case: absent any studies, the null hypothesis is naturally that there are no major differences between programming paradigms. On the issue of bug counts, there was one huge study, that was successfully reproduced [0], which finds that there is a real but small negative correlation between FP and bug counts in large GitHub projects. For productivity I haven't been able to find any large-scale studies that compare functional vs imperative/OOP languages. I did find one small scale study [1] that found significantly better productivity for Haskell (and a…

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On the Impact of Programming Languages on Code Quality — mentioned by ebingdom

Thu, 27 May 2021 11:27:50 GMT

> > it enhances the ability to reason about code > In your opinion. Correct. But my opinion is informed by years of experience with functional programming, procedural programming, and OOP (each). > Please provide any evidence that this is true, especially the ‘safe’ part. Any study I’ve read says there’s almost no effect on language choice at all on bug rate. Sure, here is a paper which provides the evidence you're looking for: "A Large Scale Study of Programming Languages and Code Quality in Github" (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2635868.2635922). That paper concludes: > The data indicates…

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On the Impact of Programming Languages on Code Quality — HN submission

Mon, 29 Mar 2021 09:24:38 GMT

On the Impact of Programming Languages on Code Quality

2 points; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

On the Impact of Programming Languages on Code Quality — mentioned by nix23

Mon, 11 Jan 2021 15:58:16 GMT

>Is there really a formal proof or Software Engineering paper that proves this? Yes (page 7): https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.10220.pdf

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On the Impact of Programming Languages on Code Quality — mentioned by yogthos

Mon, 01 Jul 2019 23:26:12 GMT

Sure, however nobody has been shown that one approach is more costly than the other in practice. The most recent research available is the replication of the large scale GitHub study [1]. The relative effects of language choice on code quality is less than 1%. The main finding is that language choice hardly matters at all. On the other hand, we can easily measure the effects of factors like sleep [2], overwork [3], and happiness [4] on code quality. If static typing was an actual factor, we’d see exactly the same kinds of effects. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying static typing, but there’s…

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On the Impact of Programming Languages on Code Quality — HN submission

Wed, 05 Jun 2019 13:35:34 GMT

On the Impact of Programming Languages on Code Quality

264 points; 133 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

On the Impact of Programming Languages on Code Quality — mentioned by pron

Sun, 02 Jun 2019 14:10:06 GMT

> this evidence has been around for ages Evidence of what? This is not a study of software development at all, but of prototyping using a program with no more than a few hundred lines. I'm talking about effects on software development. The issue of prototyping/tiny programs is a completely separate one. > Substantiate that I don't know how I can substantiate the lack of evidence, but here's a recent failed attempt to find evidence: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.10220.pdf > Lack of knowledge by an HN poster is not evidence of lack of evidence. True. While I have been following the subject for at…

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On the Impact of Programming Languages on Code Quality — mentioned by pron

Sat, 06 Apr 2019 00:04:09 GMT

That study: 1. Found a statistically significant, but a rather small effect (low single digit % IIRC) that cannot justify language/paradigm choice (choose FP for 1.5% fewer bugs!). If anything, it's evidence against a large effect. 2. Had most of even that small effect disappear on reproduction, which increases the evidence against a large effect: https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.10220

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On the Impact of Programming Languages on Code Quality — HN submission

Thu, 31 Jan 2019 05:18:44 GMT

On the Impact of Programming Languages on Code Quality

4 points; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.