Re: Languages don't matter. A mathematical refutation

[jm.tarrasa@gmail.com]

El jueves, 2 de abril de 2015, 15:36:02 (UTC+2), Dmitry A. Kazakov  escribió:
> On Thu, 2 Apr 2015 05:59:03 -0700 (PDT), brbarkstrom@gmail.com wrote:
> 
> > To change the subject a bit, is there any possibility of using
> > the probabilistic approach to estimating the long-term cost of
> > maintenance given a history of errors with a particular language?
> 
> since errors made in C are different from
> errors made in Ada. You change the language, you get *other* errors, no
> statistics across to compare.
> 
> Or taking another path, considering "probabilities" of same error made in C
> and Ada. Again,
> ...
> Apples and oranges all the way.

You can create a criteria valid for any error or language

A) Severity
 1) Data lost
 2) Crash
 3) ...
 4) Inconvenience
B) Frequency
 1) each day
 2) One a week
 3)...
C) Time needed to fix it (hours)

Score= ((Severity * K1) * (Frequency * K2)) + Time * K3

Or whatever formula you want to come with. Calculate the errors of several similar projects and you have an statistic.

Obviously the trick is in "similar projects". There are many factors, experience of programmers, experience of management, the domain of the project, the difficulty of the project.....

In fact there are a lot of  off-the-shelf packages (accounting, antivirus...), probably many of them programmed in the same language, and the quality ranges from crap to very good. That's a good clue: Language is not the main factor.