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No, pretty obviously the claim is that language properties will affect the type of commits being made, this is the premise they start from. The CACM paper then

No, pretty obviously the claim is that language properties will affect the type of commits being made, this is the premise they start from. The CACM paper then did a bad job of testing if this is true by not being vary careful with the labelling and cleaning of their data, a point on which they were then attacked. Please notice that they were critiqued on their methodology, not for thinking that commits are casually influenced by the design of the language they modify.

mumblemumble 7y ago
Their premise is even more deeply flawed than that. AFAICT, they didn't consider selection bias seriously enough. I'm not sure if it's politically correct to say this, but, e.g., it's entirely possible that particularly meticulous coders are both more likely to select a strong, statically typed functional language and generate bugs at a lower rate. And that the effect turns out to be almost entirely due to the person and not the programming language. There are also some fundamentally unanswerable questions. Like, would dynamic typing come off looking better if the selection of dynamic languages weren't dominated by warty messes like php and ecmascript?
- zzzcpan 7y ago
  > Like, would dynamic typing come off looking better if the selection of dynamic languages weren't dominated by warty messes like php and ecmascript? It already looks better if you consider that dynamic typing is more expressive and such languages take much less code to do the same thing and less time. This is not something that can be researched via commit messages, but it is rather obviously true, so the claim from the paper that "static typing is better" is also obviously false and is way out of paper's reach to even claim. But then again this is CS and such claims that go way beyond data and author's expertise are super common in CS papers. Personally I stopped taking CS papers seriously a long time ago.
  - mumblemumble 7y ago
    > This is not something that can be researched via commit messages, but it is rather obviously true I am inclined to disagree. Both static and dynamic languages suffer from the same problem here: The most well-known examples from each camp are warty messes that make terrible case studies, let alone poster children.
- luord 7y ago
  > I'm not sure if it's politically correct to say this, but, e.g., it's entirely possible that particularly meticulous coders are both more likely to select a strong, statically typed functional language I don't think you need to worry; this isn't "politically incorrect". It's just wrong. Agree with what you said afterwards, though: Meticulous coders probably are less likely to write bugs. But that will be true regardless of the languages they choose or prefer.
  - mumblemumble 7y ago
    > It's just wrong. It's something everyone has a strong opinion on, but nobody's ever really figured out how to measure. Leaving it a subject that's still firmly in the province of conjecture. Typically self-affirming conjecture. Me, I like dynamic languages, but, given that this subject is pretty much a complete knowledge vacuum, populated only by occasional iffy, easily criticized studies like the one in question, I'm inclined to say that the only position that offers any decent chance of not being informed primarily by confirmation bias is to assume that, for the most part, none of us has any firm idea what they're talking about. Least of all oneself.

mumblemumble 7y ago

Their premise is even more deeply flawed than that. AFAICT, they didn't consider selection bias seriously enough. I'm not sure if it's politically correct to say this, but, e.g., it's entirely possible that particularly meticulous coders are both more likely to select a strong, statically typed functional language and generate bugs at a lower rate. And that the effect turns out to be almost entirely due to the person and not the programming language. There are also some fundamentally unanswerable questions. Like, would dynamic typing come off looking better if the selection of dynamic languages weren't dominated by warty messes like php and ecmascript?

zzzcpan 7y ago
> Like, would dynamic typing come off looking better if the selection of dynamic languages weren't dominated by warty messes like php and ecmascript? It already looks better if you consider that dynamic typing is more expressive and such languages take much less code to do the same thing and less time. This is not something that can be researched via commit messages, but it is rather obviously true, so the claim from the paper that "static typing is better" is also obviously false and is way out of paper's reach to even claim. But then again this is CS and such claims that go way beyond data and author's expertise are super common in CS papers. Personally I stopped taking CS papers seriously a long time ago.
- mumblemumble 7y ago
  > This is not something that can be researched via commit messages, but it is rather obviously true I am inclined to disagree. Both static and dynamic languages suffer from the same problem here: The most well-known examples from each camp are warty messes that make terrible case studies, let alone poster children.
luord 7y ago
> I'm not sure if it's politically correct to say this, but, e.g., it's entirely possible that particularly meticulous coders are both more likely to select a strong, statically typed functional language I don't think you need to worry; this isn't "politically incorrect". It's just wrong. Agree with what you said afterwards, though: Meticulous coders probably are less likely to write bugs. But that will be true regardless of the languages they choose or prefer.
- mumblemumble 7y ago
  > It's just wrong. It's something everyone has a strong opinion on, but nobody's ever really figured out how to measure. Leaving it a subject that's still firmly in the province of conjecture. Typically self-affirming conjecture. Me, I like dynamic languages, but, given that this subject is pretty much a complete knowledge vacuum, populated only by occasional iffy, easily criticized studies like the one in question, I'm inclined to say that the only position that offers any decent chance of not being informed primarily by confirmation bias is to assume that, for the most part, none of us has any firm idea what they're talking about. Least of all oneself.