Articles like this based on real data are great to read. I like your analysis and share your thoughts that bug density is not significantly affected by static vs dynamic typing or any one feature for that matter. There are many reasons for bugs, many reasons why a developer reports a bug, different debugging tools and troubleshooting abilities, and many programming language features all of which factor in. One feature will never cause approximately 5 to 6 times more bugs or that feature will be quickly replaced and depreciated.
Complexity is definitely a significant factor. Another big factor is the number of intermittent errors that cannot be reproduced. Multithreaded programming and languages that do not automatically manage memory like c are more prone to intermittent bugs, race conditions, etc and have errors that are very difficult to reproduce. This leads to bugs that never get fixed and eventually add up. Fixing bugs is easy if you remember one thing... You can't kill what you can't catch.
Funny how c / c++ which has the highest bug density in Round 3 is also used in our most important systems, Linux and Windows. Remember Windows 95, 98, Me? They had problems. Windows 2000, XP, 7, and 8? Much better. Both written in C. Why was one better than the other? I assert architecture.
Thanks for the comments. Very insightful and very good question regarding C. I have always assumed that C was mandatory for performance reasons. What do you think?
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Articles like this based on real data are great to read. I like your analysis and share your thoughts that bug density is not significantly affected by static vs dynamic typing or any one feature for that matter. There are many reasons for bugs, many reasons why a developer reports a bug, different debugging tools and troubleshooting abilities, and many programming language features all of which factor in. One feature will never cause approximately 5 to 6 times more bugs or that feature will be quickly replaced and depreciated.
Complexity is definitely a significant factor. Another big factor is the number of intermittent errors that cannot be reproduced. Multithreaded programming and languages that do not automatically manage memory like c are more prone to intermittent bugs, race conditions, etc and have errors that are very difficult to reproduce. This leads to bugs that never get fixed and eventually add up. Fixing bugs is easy if you remember one thing... You can't kill what you can't catch.
Funny how c / c++ which has the highest bug density in Round 3 is also used in our most important systems, Linux and Windows. Remember Windows 95, 98, Me? They had problems. Windows 2000, XP, 7, and 8? Much better. Both written in C. Why was one better than the other? I assert architecture.
Thanks for the comments. Very insightful and very good question regarding C. I have always assumed that C was mandatory for performance reasons. What do you think?