Category: programming language
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Reliability via N-version programming?
N-version programming was first proposed in 1978, probably the most known paper on the subject was published in 1986, after which activity was mostly within safety-critical systems circles. Cost was a major issue, it’s expensive to create one version of a program, and producing independent versions is around times more expensive. Now that LLM have…
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Long term growth of programming language use
The names of files containing source code often include a suffix denoting the programming language used, e.g., .c for C source code. These suffixes provide a cheap and cheerful method for estimating programming language use within a file system directory. This method has its flaws, with two main factors introducing uncertainty into the results: The…
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Discussing new language features is more fun than measuring feature usage in code
How often are the features supported by a programming language used by developers in the code that they write? This fundamental question is rarely asked, let alone answered (my contribution). Existing code is what developers spend their time reading, compilers translating to machine code, and LLMs use as training data. Frequently used language features are…