Researchers from the University of Virginia and University of California, Davis, have published a new paper titled “A Large-Scale Study of Programming Languages and Code Quality in GitHub,” which finds that functional programing languages have some benefits over procedural or object-oriented languages. “By triangulating findings from different methods, and controlling for confounding effects such as team size, project size, and project history, we report that language design does have a significant, but modest effect on software quality,” the researchers wrote.
The paper also identified several other language features that can increase code quality, including the following:
- Disallowing type confusion
- Static typing (within functional languages)
- Managed memory usage
