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Evidence-based Software Engineering book: two years later

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

Two years ago, my book Evidence-based Software Engineering: based on the publicly available data was released. The first two weeks saw 0.25 million downloads, and 0.5 million after six months. The paperback version on Amazon has sold perhaps 20 copies.

How have the book contents fared, and how well has my claim to have discussed all the publicly available software engineering data stood up?

The contents have survived almost completely unscathed. This is primarily because reader feedback has been almost non-existent, and I have hardly spent any time rereading it.

In the last two years I have discovered maybe a dozen software engineering datasets that would have been included, had I known about them, and maybe another dozen non-software related datasets that could have been included in the Human behavior/Cognitive capitalism/Ecosystems/Reliability chapters. About half of these have been the subject of blog posts (links below), with the others waiting to be covered.

Each dataset provides a sliver of insight into the much larger picture that is software engineering; joining the appropriate dots, by analyzing multiple datasets, can provide a larger sliver of insight into the bigger picture. I have not spent much time attempting to join dots, but have joined a few tiny ones, and a few that are not so small, e.g., Estimating using a granular sequence of values and Task backlog waiting times are power laws.

I spent the first year, after the book came out, working through the backlog of tasks that had built up during the 10-years of writing. The second year was mostly dedicated to trying to find software project data (including joining Twitter), and reading papers at a much reduced rate.

The plot below shows the number of monthly downloads of the A4 and mobile friendly pdfs, along with the average kbytes per download (code+data):

Downloads of A4 and mobile pdf over 2-years... pending ISP disk not being full

The monthly averages for 2022 are around 6K A4 and 700 mobile friendly pdfs.

I have been averaging one in-person meetup per week in London. Nearly everybody I tell about the book has not previously heard of it.

The following is a list of blog posts either analyzing existing data or discussing/analyzing new data.

Introduction
analysis: Software effort estimation is mostly fake research
analysis: Moore’s law was a socially constructed project

Human behavior
data (reasoning): The impact of believability on reasoning performance
data: The Approximate Number System and software estimating
data (social conformance): How large an impact does social conformity have on estimates?
data (anchoring): Estimating quantities from several hundred to several thousand
data: Cognitive effort, whatever it might be

Ecosystems
data: Growth in number of packages for widely used languages
data: Analysis of a subset of the Linux Counter data
data: Overview of broad US data on IT job hiring/firing and quitting

Projects
analysis: Delphi and group estimation
analysis: The CESAW dataset: a brief introduction
analysis: Parkinson’s law, striving to meet a deadline, or happenstance?
analysis: Evaluating estimation performance
analysis: Complex software makes economic sense
analysis: Cost-effectiveness decision for fixing a known coding mistake
analysis: Optimal sizing of a product backlog
analysis: Evolution of the DORA metrics
analysis: Two failed software development projects in the High Court

data: Pomodoros worked during a day: an analysis of Alex’s data
data: Multi-state survival modeling of a Jira issues snapshot
data: Over/under estimation factor for ‘most estimates’
data: Estimation accuracy in the (building|road) construction industry
data: Rounding and heaping in non-software estimates
data: Patterns in the LSST:DM Sprint/Story-point/Story ‘done’ issues
data: Shopper estimates of the total value of items in their basket

Reliability
analysis: Most percentages are more than half

Statistical techniques
Fitting discontinuous data from disparate sources
Testing rounded data for a circular uniform distribution

Post 2020 data
Pomodoros worked during a day: an analysis of Alex’s data
Impact of number of files on number of review comments
Finding patterns in construction project drawing creation dates

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A study of deceit when reporting information in a known context

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

A variety of conflicting factors intrude when attempting to form an impartial estimate of the resources needed to perform a task. The customer/manager, asking for the estimate wants to hear a low value, creating business/social pressure to underestimate; overestimating increases the likelihood of completing the task within budget.

A study by Oey, Schachner and Vul investigated the strategic reasoning for deception/lying in a two-person game.

A game involved a Sender and Receiver, with the two players alternating between the roles. The game started with both subjects seeing a picture of a box containing red and blue marbles (the percentage of red marbles was either 20%, 50%, or 80%). Ten marbles were randomly selected from this ‘box’, and shown to the Sender. The Sender was asked to report to the Receiver the number of red marbles appearing in the random selection, K_{report} (there was an incentive to report higher/lower, and punishment for being caught being inaccurate). The Receiver could accept or reject the number of red balls reported by the Sender. In the actual experiment, unknown to the human subjects, one of every game’s subject pair was always played by a computer. Every subject played 100 games.

In the inflate condition: If the Receiver accepted the report, the Sender gained K_{report} points, and the Receiver gained 10-K_{report} points.

If the Receiver rejected the report, then:

  • if the Sender’s report was accurate (i.e.,K_{report} == K_{actual}), the Sender gained K_{report} points, and the Receiver gained 10-K_{report}-5 points (i.e., a -5 point penalty),
  • if the Sender’s report was not accurate, the Receiver gained 5 points, and the Sender lost 5 points.

In the deflate condition: The points awarded to the Sender was based on the number of blue balls in the sample, and the points awarded to the Received was based on the number of red balls in the sample (i.e., the Sender had in incentive to report fewer red balls).

The plot below shows the mean rate of deceit (i.e., the fraction of a subject’s reports where K_{actual} < K_{report}, averaged over all 116 subject’s mean) for a given number of red marbles actually seen by the Sender; vertical lines show one standard deviation, calculated over the mean of all subjects (code+data):

Mean rate of deceit for each number of red marbles seen, with bars showing standard deviation.

Subjects have some idea of the percentage of red/blue balls, and are aware that their opponent has a similar idea.

The wide variation in the fraction of reports where a subject reported a value greater than the number of marbles seen, is likely caused by variation in subject level of risk aversion. Some subjects may have decided to reduce effort by always accurately reporting, while others may have tried to see how much they could get away with.

The wide variation is particularly noticeable in the case of a box containing 80% red. If a Sender’s random selection contains few reds, then the Sender can feel confident reporting to have seen more.

The general pattern shows subjects being more willing to increase the reported number when they are supplied with few.

There is a distinct change of behavior when half of the sample contains more than five red marbles. In this situation, subjects may be happy to have been dealt a good hand, and are less inclined to risk losing 5-points for less gain.

Estimating involves considering more factors than the actual resources likely to be needed to implement the task; the use of round numbers is one example. This study is one of few experimental investigations of numeric related deception. The use of students having unknown motivation is far from ideal, but they are better than nothing.

When estimating in a team context, there is an opportunity to learn about the expectations of others and the consequences of over/under estimating. An issue for another study 🙂

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Studying the lifetime of Open source

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

A software system can be said to be dead when the information needed to run it ceases to be available.

Provided the necessary information is available, plus time/money, no software ever has to remain dead, hardware emulators can be created, support libraries can be created, and other necessary files cobbled together.

In the case of software as a service, the vendor may simply stop supplying the service; after which, in my experience, critical components of the internal service ecosystem soon disperse and are forgotten about.

Users like the software they use to be actively maintained (i.e., there are one or more developers currently working on the code). This preference is culturally driven, in that we are living through a period in which most in-use software systems are actively maintained.

Active maintenance is perceived as a signal that the software has some amount of popularity (i.e., used by other people), and is up-to-date (whatever that means, but might include supporting the latest features, or problem reports are being processed; neither of which need be true). Commercial users like actively maintained software because it enables the option of paying for any modifications they need to be made.

Software can be a zombie, i.e., neither dead or alive. Zombie software will continue to work for as long as the behavior of its external dependencies (e.g., libraries) remains sufficiently the same.

Active maintenance requires time/money. If active maintenance is required, then invest the time/money.

Open source software has become widely used. Is Open source software frequently maintained, or do projects inhabit some form of zombie state?

Researchers have investigated various aspects of the life cycle of open source projects, including: maintenance activity, pull acceptance/merging or abandoned, and turnover of core developers; also, projects in niche ecosystems have been investigated.

The commits/pull requests/issues, of circa 1K project repos with lots of stars, is data that can be automatically extracted and analysed in bulk. What is missing from the analysis is the context around the creation, development and apparent abandonment of these projects.

Application areas and development tools (e.g., editor, database, gui framework, communications, scientific, engineering) tend to have a few widely used programs, which continue to be actively worked on. Some people enjoy creating programs/apps, and will start development in an area where there are existing widely used programs, purely for the enjoyment or to scratch an itch; rarely with the intent of long term maintenance, even when their project attracts many other developers.

I suspect that much of the existing research is simply measuring the background fizz of look-alike programs coming and going.

A more realistic model of the lifecycle of Open source projects requires human information; the intent of the core developers, e.g., whether the project is intended to be long-term, primarily supported by commercial interests, abandoned for a successor project, or whether events got in the way of the great things planned.

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Clustering source code within functions

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

The question of how best to cluster source code into functions is a perennial debate that has been ongoing since functions were first created.

Beginner programmers are told that clustering code into functions is good, for a variety of reasons (none of the claims are backed up by experimental evidence). Structuring code based on clustering the implementation of a single feature is a common recommendation; this rationale can be applied at both the function/method and file/class level.

The idea of an optimal function length (measured in statements) continues to appeal to developers/researchers, but lacks supporting evidence (despite a cottage industry of research papers). The observation that most reported fault appear in short functions is a consequence of most of a program’s code appearing in short functions.

I have had to deal with code that has not been clustered into functions. When microcomputers took off, some businessmen taught themselves to code, wrote software for their line of work and started selling it. If the software was a success, more functionality was needed, and the businessman (never encountered a woman doing this) struggled to keep on top of things. A common theme was a few thousand lines of unstructured code in one function in a single file

Adding structural bureaucracy (e.g., functions and multiple files) reduced the effort needed to maintain and enhance the code.

The problem with ‘born flat’ source is that the code for unrelated functionality is often intermixed, and global variables are freely used to communicate state. I have seen the same problems in structured function code, but instances are nowhere near as pervasive.

When implementing the same program, do different developers create functions implementing essentially the same functionality?

I am aware of two datasets relating to this question: 1) when implementing the same small specification (average length program 46.3 lines), a surprising number of variants (6,301) are created, 2) an experiment that asked developers to reintroduce functions into ‘flattened’ code.

The experiment (Alexey Braver’s MSc thesis) took an existing Python program, ‘flattened’ it by inlining functions (parameters were replaced by the corresponding call arguments), and asked subjects to “… partition it into functions in order to achieve what you consider to be a good design.”

The 23 rows in the plot below show the start/end (green/brown delimited by blue lines) of each function created by the 23 subjects; red shows code not within a function, and right axis is percentage of each subjects’ code contained in functions. Blue line shows original (currently plotted incorrectly; patched original code+data):

3n+1 programs containing various lines of code.

There are many possible reasons for the high level of agreement between subjects, including: 1) the particular example chosen, 2) the code was already well-structured, 3) subjects were explicitly asked to create functions, 4) the iterative process of discovering code that needs to be written did not occur, 5) no incentive to leave existing working code as-is.

Given that most source has a short and lonely existence, is too much time being spent bike-shedding function contents?

Given how often lower level design time happens at code implementation time, perhaps discussion of function contents ought to be viewed as more about thinking how things fit together and interact, than about each function in isolation.

Analyzing each function in isolation can create perverse incentives.

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Printing press+widespread religious behavior: A theory

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

The book The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous provides an explanation of the processes which weakened the existing social ties of family and tribe; however, the emergence of WEIRD people (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) required new social norms to spread and be accepted throughout society. A major technical innovation, in the form of the printing press, provided the means for mass communication of ideas and practices.

David High-Jones’ book Wyclif’s Dust: Western Cultures from the Printing Press to the Present describes the social consequences of what he calls book religion; a combination of deeply religious western societies and the ability of individuals to write and sell affordable books (made possible by the printing press). Religion+printing press created the conditions for what High-Jones calls a hothouse culture, a period from the 1600s to the end of the 1800s.

Around 1440 the printing press is invented and quickly spreads; around 5 million books were handwritten in the 1400s, about 80 million books were produced in the first 50 years of printing, and around a billion in the 1700s. During the 1500s the Protestant reformation happens; Protestant encouraged its followers to read the Bible, which creates a demand for printed Bibles and the need to be able to read (which increases literacy rates). In England, between 1480-1640, 40% of published books were religious.

The changes to society’s existing norms are wrought by cultural transmission, initially via middle class parents making use of edifying books to teach their children moral values and social skills, later Sunday schools took on this role, but also had to offer reading lessons to attract members. In the adult world, accepted norms were maintained by social enforcement. The impact on western societies was widespread because observant religious behavior was widespread.

The original intent, of those writing the religious books, was the creation of a god fearing society. In practice, a trust based society was created, where workers might be relied upon not to shirk their duties and businessmen to not renege on agreements.

In the beginning science, in the form of printed technical books, rarely made an appearance. In the 1700s the Enlightenment happens, and scientific books are discussed by small collections of disparate individuals. The industrial revolution happens, but the bulk of the demand is for trustworthy workers; technical and scientific know how remains a minority interest.

In Part I of the book, High-Jones weaves a reading and convincing narrative. Part II, 1900 to today, is a tale of the crumbling and breakdown of the social forces and incentives that creates the trust based society; while example are enumerated, no overarching theory is proposed (I skimmed this part).

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Shopper estimates of the total value of items in their basket

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

Agile development processes break down the work that needs to be done into a collection of tasks (which may be called stories or some other name). A task, whose implementation time may be measured in hours or a few days, is itself composed of a collection of subtasks (which may in turn be composed of subsubtasks, and so on down).

When asked to estimate the time needed to implement a task, a developer may settle on a value by adding up estimates of the effort needed to implement the subtasks thought to be involved. If this process is performed in the mind of the developer (i.e., not by writing down a list of subtask estimates), the accuracy of the result may be affected by the characteristics of cognitive arithmetic.

Humans have two cognitive systems for processing quantities, the approximate number system (which has been found to be present in the brain of many creatures), and language. Researchers studying the approximate number system often ask subjects to estimate the number of dots in an image; I recently discovered studies of number processing that used language.

In a study by Benjamin Scheibehenne, 966 shoppers at the checkout counter in a grocery shop were asked to estimate the total value of the items in their shopping basket; a subset of 421 subjects were also asked to estimate the number of items in their basket (this subset were also asked if they used a shopping list). The actual price and number of items was obtained after checkout.

There are broad similarities between shopping basket estimation and estimating task implementation time, e.g., approximate idea of number of items and their cost. Does an analysis of the shopping data suggest ideas for patterns that might be present in software task estimate data?

The left plot below shows shopper estimated total item value against actual, with fitted regression line (red) and estimate==actual (grey); the right plot shows shopper estimated number of items in their basket against actual, with fitted regression line (red) and estimate==actual (grey) (code+data):

Left: Shopper estimated total value against actual, with fitted regression line; right: shopper estimated number of items against actual, with fitted regression line.

The model fitted to estimated total item value is: totalActual=1.4totalEstimate^{0.93}, which differs from software task estimates/actuals in always underestimating over the range measured; the exponent value, 0.93, is at the upper range of those seen for software task estimates.

The model fitted to estimated number of items in the basket is: itemsActual=1.8itemsEstimate^{0.75}. This pattern, of underestimating small values and overestimating large values is seen in software task estimation, but the exponent of 0.75 is much smaller.

Including the estimated number of items in the shopping basket, Nguess, in a model for total value produces a slightly better fitting model: totalActual=1.4totalEstimate^{0.92}e^{0.003itemsEstimate}, which explains 83% of the variance in the data (use of a shopping list had a relatively small impact).

The accuracy of a software task implementation estimate based on estimating its subtasks dependent on identifying all the subtasks, or having a good enough idea of the number of subtasks. The shopping basket study found a pattern of inaccuracies in estimates of the number of recently collected items, which has been seen before. However, adding Nguess to the Shopping model only reduced the unexplained variance by a few percent.

Would the impact of adding an estimate of the number of subtasks to models of software task estimates also only be a few percent? A question to add to the already long list of unknowns.

Like task estimates, round numbers were often given as estimate values; see code+data.

The same study also included a laboratory experiment, where subjects saw a sequence of 24 numbers, presented one at a time for 0.5 seconds each. At the end of the sequence, subjects were asked to type in their best estimate of the sum of the numbers seen (other studies asked subjects to type in the mean). Each subject saw 75 sequences, with feedback on the mean accuracy of their responses given after every 10 sequences. The numbers were described as the prices of items in a shopping basket. The values were drawn from a distribution that was either uniform, positively skewed, negatively skewed, unimodal, or bimodal. The sequential order of values was either increasing, decreasing, U-shaped, or inversely U-shaped.

Fitting a regression model to the lab data finds that the distribution used had very little impact on performance, and the sequence order had a small impact; see code+data.

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Overview of broad US data on IT job hiring/firing and quitting

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

Software developers are employed by organizations and people change jobs, either voluntarily or not; every year a new batch of people join the workforce, e.g., new graduates. Governments track employment activities for a variety of reasons, e.g., tax collection, and monitoring labour supply and demand (for the purposes of planning).

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics’ publishes a monthly summary of their Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. What can be learned about software development employment from this data (description)?

The data starts in December 2000, with each row contains a monthly count of Job Openings, Hires, Quits, Layoffs and Discharges, and totals, along with one of 21 major non-farm industry codes or one of the 5 government codes (the counts are broken out by State). I’m guessing that software developers are assigned the Information code (i.e., 510000), but who is to say that some have not been classified with the code for, say, Construction or Education and health services. The Information code will cover a lot more than just software developers; I’m trading off broad IT coverage for monthly details on employment turnover (software developer specific information is available, but it comes without the turnover information). The Bureau of Labor Statistics make available a huge quantity of information, and understanding how it all fits together would probably require me to spend several months learning my way around (I have already spent a week or two over the years), so I’m sticking with a prebuilt dataset.

The plot below shows the aggregated monthly counts (i.e., all states) of Job Openings, Hires, Quits, Layoffs and Discharges for the Information industry code (code+data):

Aggregated monthly counts of Job Openings, Hires, Quits, Layoffs and Discharges for the Information industry code, from 2000 to 2022.

The general trend follows the ups and downs of the economy, there is a huge spike in layoffs in early 2020 (the start of COVID), and Job Openings often exceeding Hires (which I did not expect).

These counts have the form of a time-series, which leads to the questions about repeating patterns in the sequence of values? The plot below shows the autocorrelation of the four employment counts (code+data):

Autocorrelation of Job Openings, Hires, Quits, Layoffs time series for the Information code.

The spike in Hires at 12-months is too large to be just be new graduates entering the workforce; perhaps large IT employers have annual reviews for all employees at the same time every year, causing some people to quit and obtain new jobs (Quits has a slightly larger spike at 12-months). Why is there a regular 3-month cycle for Job Openings? The negative correlation in Layoffs at one & two months is explained by companies laying off a batch of workers one month, followed by layoffs in the following two months being lower than usual.

I don’t know much about employment practices, so I won’t speculate any more. Comments welcome.

Are there any interest cross-correlations between the pairs of time-series?

The plot below shows four pairs of cross correlations (code+data):

Cross correlation between the pairs of time series Hires/Layoffs, Quits/Layoffs, Job Openings/Hires, and Hires/Quits.

Hires & Layoffs shows a scattered pattern of Hires preceding Layoffs (to be expected), and the bottom left shows there is a pattern of Quits preceding Layoffs (are people searching for steadier employment when layoffs loom?). Top right shows a pattern of Job Openings following Hires (I’m clutching at straws for this; is Hires a proxy for Quits, the cross correlation of Job Openings & Quits does have Job Openings leading), the bottom right shows the pattern of Hires leading Quits.

Nothing in this analysis surprised me, but then it is rather basic and broad brush. These results are the start of an analysis of the IT employment ecosystem; one that probably won’t progress far because of a lack of data and interest on my part.

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Optimal sizing of a product backlog

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

Developers working on the implementation of a software system will have a list of work that needs to be done, a to-do list, known as the product backlog in Agile.

The Agile development process differs from the Waterfall process in that the list of work items is intentionally incomplete when coding starts (discovery of new work items is an integral part of the Agile process). In a Waterfall process, it is intended that all work items are known before coding starts (as work progresses, new items are invariably discovered).

Complaints are sometimes expressed about the size of a team’s backlog, measured in number of items waiting to be implemented. Are these complaints just grumblings about the amount of work outstanding, or is there an economic cost that increases with the size of the backlog?

If the number of items in the backlog is too low, developers may be left twiddling their expensive thumbs because they have run out of work items to implement.

A parallel is sometimes drawn between items waiting to be implemented in a product backlog and hardware items in a manufacturer’s store waiting to be checked-out for the production line. Hardware occupies space on a shelf, a cost in that the manufacturer has to pay for the building to hold it; another cost is the interest on the money spent to purchase the items sitting in the store.

For over 100 years, people have been analyzing the problem of the optimum number of stock items to order, and at what stock level to place an order. The economic order quantity gives the optimum number of items to reorder, Q (the derivation assumes that the average quantity in stock is Q/2), it is given by:

Q=sqrt{{2DK}/h}, where D is the quantity consumed per year, K is the fixed cost per order (e.g., cost of ordering, shipping and handling; not the actual cost of the goods), h is the annual holding cost per item.

What is the likely range of these values for software?

  • D is around 1,000 per year for a team of ten’ish people working on multiple (related) projects; based on one dataset,
  • K is the cost associated with the time taken to gather the requirements, i.e., the items to add to the backlog. If we assume that the time taken to gather an item is less than the time taken to implement it (the estimated time taken to implement varies from hours to days), then the average should be less than an hour or two,
  • h: While the cost of a post-it note on a board, or an entry in an online issue tracking system, is effectively zero, there is the time cost of deciding which backlog items should be implemented next, or added to the next Sprint.

    If the backlog starts with n items, and it takes t seconds to decide whether a given item should be implemented next, and f is the fraction of items scanned before one is selected: the average decision time per item is: avDecideTime={f*n*(f*n+1)/2}*t seconds. For example, if n=50, pulling some numbers out of the air, f=0.5, and t=10, then avDecideTime=325, or 5.4 minutes.

    The Scrum approach of selecting a subset of backlog items to completely implement in a Sprint has a much lower overhead than the one-at-a-time approach.

If we assume that K/h==1, then Q=sqrt{2*1000}=44.7.

An ‘order’ for 45 work items might make sense when dealing with clients who have formal processes in place and are not able to be as proactive as an Agile developer might like, e.g., meetings have to be scheduled in advance, with minutes circulated for agreement.

In a more informal environment, with close client contacts, work items are more likely to trickle in or appear in small batches. The SiP dataset came from such an environment. The plot below shows the number of tasks in the backlog of the SiP dataset, for each day (blue/green) and seven-day rolling average (red) (code+data):

Tasks waiting to be implemented, per day, over duration of SiP projects.

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Career progression: an invisible issue in software development

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

Career progression is an important issue in the development of some software systems, but its impact is rarely discussed, let along researched. A common consequence of career progression is that a project looses a member of staff, e.g., they move to work on a different project, or leave the company. Hiring staff and promoting staff are related neglected research areas.

Understanding the initial and ongoing development of non-trivial software systems requires an understanding of the career progression, and expectations of progression, of the people working on the system.

Effectively working on a software system requires some amount of knowledge of how it operates, or is intended to operate. The loss of a person with working knowledge of a system reduces the rate at which a project can be further developed. It takes time to find a suitable replacement, and for that person’s knowledge of the behavior of the existing system to reach a workable level.

We know that most software is short-lived, but know almost nothing about the involvement-lifetime of those who work on software systems.

There has been some research studying the durations over which people have been involved with individual Open source projects. However, I don’t believe the findings from this research, because I think that non-paid involvement on an Open source project has very different duration and motivation characteristics than a paying job (there are also data cleaning issues around the same person using multiple email addresses, and people working in small groups with one person submitting code).

Detailed employment data, in bulk, has commercial value, and so is rarely freely available. It is possible to scrape data from the adverts of job websites, but this only provides information about the kinds of jobs available, not the people employed.

LinkedIn contains lots of detailed employment history, and the US courts have ruled that it is not illegal to scrape this data. It’s on my list of things to do, and I keep an eye out for others making such data available.

The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth has followed the lives of 10k+ people since 1979 (people were asked to detail their lives in periodic surveys). Using this data, Joseph, Boh, Ang, and Slaughter investigated the job categories within the career paths of 500 people who had worked in a technical IT role. The plot below shows the career paths of people who had spent at least five years working in an IT role (code+data):

The job categories contained within the seven career paths in which people spent at least five years working in a technical IT role.

Employment history provides an upper bound for the time that a person is likely to have worked on a project (being employed to work on an Open source project while, over time, working at multiple companies is an edge case).

A company may have employees simultaneously working on multiple projects, spending a percentage of their time on each. How big a resource impact is the loss of such a person? Were they simply the same kind of cog in multiple projects, or did they play an important synchronization role across projects? Details on all the projects a person worked on would help answer some questions.

Building a software system involves a lot more than writing the code. Technical managers working on high level, broad brush, issues. The project knowledge that technical managers have contributes to ongoing work, and the impact of loosing a technical manager is probably more of a longer term issue than loosing a coding-developer.

There are systems that are developed and maintained by essentially one person over many years. These get written about and celebrated, but are comparatively rare.

One of the more reliable ways of estimating developer productivity is to measure the impact of them leaving a project.

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Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals by Jean E. Sammet is often cited in discussions of language history, but very rarely read (I appreciate that many oft cited books have not been read by those citing them, but age further reduces the likelihood that anybody has read this book; it was published in 1969). I read this book as an undergraduate, but did not think much of it. For around five years it has been on my list of books to buy, should a second-hand copy become available below £10 (I buy anything vaguely interesting below this price, with most ending up left on trains or the book table of coffee shops).

Thanks to Adam Gashlin the Internet Archive now contains a downloadable copy.

The list of 120 languages covered contains a handful of the 28 languages covered in an article from 1957. Sammet says that of the 120, 20 are already dead or on obsolete computers (i.e., it is unlikely that another compiler will be written), and that about 15 are widely used/implemented).

Today, the book is no longer a discussion of the recent past, but a window in to the Cambrian explosion of programming languages that happened in the 1960s (almost everything since then has been a variation on a theme); languages from the 1950s are also included.

How does the material appear to me from a 2022 vantage-point?

The organization of the book reminded me that programming languages were once categorized by application domain, i.e., scientific/engineering users, business users, and string & list processing (i.e., academic users). This division reflected the market segmentation for computer hardware (back then, personal computers were still in the realm of science fiction). Modern programming language books (e.g., Scott’s “Programming Language Pragmatics”) often organize material based on implementation details, e.g., lexical analysis, and scoping rules.

The overview of programming languages given in the first three chapters covers nearly all the basic issues that beginners are taught today, but the emphasis is different (plus typographical differences, such as keyword spelt ‘key word’).

Two major language constructs are missing: Dynamic storage allocation is not discussed: Wirth’s book Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs is seven years in the future, and Kernighan and Ritchie’s The C Programming Language nine years; Simula gets a paragraph, but no mention of the object-oriented concepts it introduced.

What is a programming language, and what are the distinguishing features that make some of them high-level programming languages?

These questions may sound pointless or obvious today, but people used to spend lots of time arguing over what was, or was not, a high-level language.

Sammet says: “… the first characteristic of a programming language is that the user can write a program without knowing much—if anything—about the physical characteristics of the machine on which the program is to be run.”, and goes on to infer: “… a major characteristic of a programming language is that there must be a reasonable potential of having a source program written in that language run on two computers with different machine codes without rewriting the source program. … In most programming languages, some—but often very little—rewriting of the source program is necessary.”

The reason that some rewriting of the source was likely to be needed is that there were often a lot of small variations between compilers for the same language. Compilers tended to be bespoke, i.e., the Fortran compiler for the X cpu running OS Y was written specifically for that combination. Retargetting an existing compiler to a new cpu or OS was much talked about, but it was more fun to write a new compiler (and anyway, support for new features was needed, and it was simpler to start from scratch; page 149 lists differences in Fortran compilers across IBM machines). It didn’t help that there was also a lot of variation in fundamental quantities such as word length, e.g., 16, 18, 20, 24, 32, 36, 40, 48, 60 bit words; see page 18 of Dictionary of Computer Languages.

Sammet makes the distinction: “One of the prime differences between assembly and higher level languages is that to date the latter do not have the capability of modifying themselves at execution time.”

Sammet then goes on to list the advantages and disadvantages of what she calls higher level languages. Most of the claimed advantages will be familiar to readers: “Ease of Learning”, “Ease of Coding and Understanding”, “Ease of Debugging”, and “Ease of Maintaining and Documenting”. The disadvantages included: “Time Required for Compiling” (the issue here is converting assembler source to object code is much faster than compiling a high-level language), “Inefficient Object Code” (the translation process was often a one-to-one mapping of what was written, e.g., little reuse of register contents), “Difficulties in Debugging Without Learning Machine Language” (symbolic debuggers are still in the future).

Sammet’s observation: “In spite of the fact that higher level languages have been with us for over 10 years, there has been relatively little quantitative or qualitative analysis of their advantages and disadvantages.” is still true 50 years later.

If you enjoy learning about lots of different languages, you will like this book. The discussion of specific languages contains copious examples, which for me brought things to life.

Sites such as the Internet Archive and Bitsavers make the book’s references accessible (there are a few I had not seen before), and offer readers a path to pre-Cambrian times.

Saul Rosen’s 1967 book “Programming Systems and Languages” is sometimes cited in discussions of programming language history. This book is a collection of papers that discuss a variety of languages and the operating systems that support them. Fewer languages are covered, but in more depth, along with lots of implementation details. Again, lots of interesting references.