Dan Luu did a review of a lot of the literature at the time, and included a short analysis of this paper.<p><a href="https://danluu.com/empirical-pl/#a-large-scale-study-of-programming-languages-and-code-quality-in-github-ray-b-posnett-d-filkov-v-devanbu-p-http-dl-acm-org-citation-cfm-id-2635922" rel="nofollow">https://danluu.com/empirical-pl/#a-large-scale-study-of-prog...</a><p>This review ends with a harsh but fair assessment.<p>> The authors of the paper repeatedly run into what Pinker calls the igon value problem. The authors appear to not understand the subject they’re studying well enough to even say what it is they’re studying.<p>If you're interested in actual research, I personally think this other study seems to be OK.<p><a href="http://ttendency.cs.ucl.ac.uk/projects/type_study/documents/type_study.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://ttendency.cs.ucl.ac.uk/projects/type_study/documents/...</a>
I have no problem with the methodology and results of this article, but I think conclusion that "functional languages are better than procedural languages; ..." only applies to bugs; in reality the choices of programming languages are determined by many factors, bug-proneness is not even the most important thing to consider.