Article about code density as a measure of programming language power

Question

I remember reading an article saying something like

"The number of bugs introduced doesn't vary much with different programming languages, but it depends pretty much on SLOC (source lines of code). So, using the programming language that can implement the same functions with smaller SLOC is preferable in terms of stability."

The author wanted to stress the advantages of using Functional Programming, as normally one can program with a smaller number of LOC. I remember the author cited a research paper about the irrelevance of choice of programming language and the number of bugs.

Is there anyone who knows the research paper or the article?

Answer 1

Paul Graham wrote something very like this in his essay Succinctness is Power. He quotes a report from Ericsson, which may be the paper you remember?

Reports from the field, though they will necessarily be less precise than "scientific" studies, are likely to be more meaningful. For example, Ulf Wiger of Ericsson did a study that concluded that Erlang was 4-10x more succinct than C++, and proportionately faster to develop software in:

Comparisons between Ericsson-internal development projects indicate similar line/hour productivity, including all phases of software development, rather independently of which language (Erlang, PLEX, C, C++, or Java) was used. What differentiates the different languages then becomes source code volume.

Answer 2

I'm not sure if it's the source you're thinking of, but there's something about this in Code Complete chapter 27.3 (p652) - that references "Program Quality and Programmer Productivity" (Jones 1977) and "Estimating Software Costs" (Jones 1998).

Answer 3

The book of pragmatic Thinking & Learning points to this article.

http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:7Rt1S5e-510J:rbsc.com/docs/IEEE-SW-6S.pdf+Can+a+Manufacturing+Quality+Model+Work+for+Software%3F&hl=en&gl=us&sig=AHIEtbTxQLUjmUWx_8-TOoB-pFgquTrYfg

Answer 4

I've seen this argument about "succinctness = power" a few times, and I've never really bought it. That's because there are languages (e.g., J, Ursala) which are quite succinct but not (IMO) easy to read because they put so much meaning into individual symbols.

Perhaps the true metric should be the extent to which it is possible to write a particular algorithm both clearly and succinctly. Mind you, I don't know how to measure that.