One of my most controversial software opinions is that your sleep quality and stress level matter far, far more than the languages you use or the practices you follow. Nothing else comes close: not type systems, not TDD, not formal methods, not ANYTHING. Allow me to explain why.
I don’t want to detract too much from your main point, which is a good one—factors like sleep and stress influence programming ability in a significant way, and so they shouldn’t be ignored in favor of more technical merits of languages or tools.
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But I think interpreting these studies to conclude that choice of language doesn’t affect defects significantly is an extremely dangerous take. The actual issue is some of these programmer studies massively inflate conclusions relative to their claims.
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Your cited paper/review uses the methodology “if a commit was believed to have fixed a bug, then that was +1 defect for repository language X.” Ok, fine, that is a metric we can analyze, but to leap from that to language quality is a huge gap.
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cognitive psychology. PhD