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Discussion on: The broken promise of static typing

 
danlebrero profile image
Dan Lebrero

thanks for the feedback. I will try to make it more clear!

To your question, yes, that is what I meant by bug density. Language X will have 1 bug per repo and language Y will have 3.

To your particular example, it is useful if the 100 lines of code provide the same amount of functionality than the 50 million lines.

Of course, I don't know any language that is 500k more succinct than other, but I don't either know of any 50 million lines codebase with 3 bugs.

What I do expect is that roughly all developers, no matter the language, have to solve the same problems, so the open source libraries available have roughly the same functionality.

Thanks!

Dan

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david_raab profile image
David Raab

Sure, you don't find a 50 million line code project with just 3 bugs. It will have a lot more. That's the point, the bigger the code size the more bugs you usually have.

Usually a comparison of bugs per line of code is "better". But "better" still doesn't mean useful. Some languages are 2-3 times more succinct for the same functionality. So a more succinct language with the exact same amount of bugs will automatically have a larger "bug density" (considering bugs per line of code).

The assumption that every language somehow solves the same problems is also not really correct. A lot of languages like PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl and so on are primarily web-development. And a lot of stuff is only solved by using C libraries. Or in other word, not really solved at all.

Some binding to GUI frameworks like GTK, Qt or game-engines (what you see in Python and so on) sure never will have the code size or complexity like a whole library in C (its just a binding).

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danlebrero profile image
Dan Lebrero

I am indeed generalising and assuming that most of us either build websites or do ETL from source A to source B. Probably because that is what I have done for the whole of my career (boring!).

I think you are right to point out that all languages rely on C or C++, but I think that is true for all of them, not just the ones that you mention.

Thanks for the comments!

Daniel