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Mike Dunlavey
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FWIW, in my experience

  1. There are two kinds of bugs: a) where the program does not meet expectations, and b) where the program cannot meet any reasonable expectations, because it crashes/hangs/won't compile.

  2. Regardless of language, bugs of type (b) are caused by redundancy in data/class structure, where changing something in one part of the data structure puts the structure in an inconsistent/broken state until one or more corresponding changes are made in other parts. Contributing to this is redundancy of source code, where an edit to one line of code makes the code incorrect until one or more changes are made in other parts. These two types of redundancy are closely related, of course, and since programmers are not super-persons they get distracted, forget things, and make mistakes, thereby putting in bugs.

These things (again, in my experience) are not really a function of the language, but of the skill/maturity of the programmer. Programs that are much less bug-prone also tend to be much smaller, in terms of LOC, for a given set of functionality.

I've seen systems where some people write programs, while others write directories, and the former tend to "just work" compared to the latter.

Mike Dunlavey
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