talks about how great book-code-complete-2 is
podcast-rr-184-what-we-know-about-software-development#google-developers-lose-time-to-module-dependency-errors1 AVDI: But how much does it matter, or do we know how much it matters to make languages that are easy for novices? In other words, is there a difference that disappears as people get more experienced with programming in general? Obviously, the double equals comes from C. It's there to make things comfortable for C programmers, not for novices.
ANDREAS: Yeah, we don't know. The number of studies is astonishingly small, astonishingly small. However, we do know that compiler errors are actually an issue for professionals from a Google study that was done at ICSE 2014, a big software engineering conference. But what we do know from their study is that the types of errors that professionals at Google, and I want to say that very clearly because the context is important, the type of issues that they have are different than some of the issues that novices have.
So for example, the Google study if I recall correctly show that the biggest predictor of developers losing time to, productivity time, to compiler errors, again not syntax but compiler errors, was anything related to these module dependencies. You know what I'm talking about, how you don't just have a compiler error. You have a compiler error because you need to load a library on your path or whatever that is. Apparently, those errors are a major problem for developers at Google. However, when you look at errors for novices things change a little bit. podcast-rr-184-what-we-know-about-software-development#google-developers-lose-time-to-module-dependency-errors1
podcast-rr-184-what-we-know-about-software-development#tdd-no-quality-or-speed-difference1 2 3 Now, in the same book where we report on that, there's a meta-study compiling all of the evidence that we had in 2010 about test-driven development. And it turns out that on balance, there is no evidence that it has any impact up or down on the quality of software or the speed with which it's produced. podcast-rr-184-what-we-know-about-software-development#tdd-no-quality-or-speed-difference1 2 3