A proper language comparison...

[Peter Alexander]

On Thursday, 25 July 2013 at 20:28:54 UTC, bearophile wrote:
> Peter Alexander:
>
>> - What's safe and unsafe is very subjective.
>
> There are large bodies of people that count bugs in code, and 
> correlate them with coding practices. They have created 
> language subsets like C for automotive industry, C++ for 
> aviation, code for space missions, Ada language and its 
> successive refinements like Ada2012, SPARK subset of Ada. There 
> are lot of people trying sideways solutions, at Microsoft 
> (Spec#, Liquid typing, etc), dependent typing (ATS language), 
> and so on and on, even Haskell variants. Lot of this stuff is 
> not based on statistical data, but there is also some hard data 
> that has shaped some of those very strict coding guidelines. 
> There are several serious studies in the field of coding 
> safety. Dismissing all that decades old work with a 'very 
> subjective' is unjust.

Allow me to put it another way by way of analogy: health. We know 
from medical studies what kinds of things are healthy, and what 
things are unhealthy. However, if I were to present 10 people, 
and witness their actions for a week, would anyone be able to 
accurately order them on their "healthiness"? Would every medical 
expert arrive at the same ordering?

Maybe subjective is the wrong word to use. Maybe what I meant was 
"difficult to quantify".