TY - GEN
T1 - The Babel of software development : linguistic diversity in open source
AU - Vasilescu, B.N.
AU - Serebrenik, A.
AU - Brand, van den, M.G.J.
PY - 2013
Y1 - 2013
N2 - Open source software (OSS) development communities are typically very specialised, on the one hand, and experience high turnover, on the other. Combination of specialization and turnover can cause parts of the system implemented in a certain programming language to become unmaintainable, if knowledge of that language has disappeared together with the retiring developers.
Inspired by measures of linguistic diversity from the study of natural languages, we propose a method to quantify the risk of not having maintainers for code implemented in a certain programming language. To illustrate our approach, we studied risks associated with different languages in Emacs, and found examples of low risk due to high popularity (e.g., C, Emacs Lisp); low risk due to similarity with popular languages (e.g., C++, Java, Python); or high risk due to both low popularity and low similarity with popular languages (e.g., Lex). Our results show that methods from the social sciences can be successfully applied in the study of information systems, and open numerous avenues for future research.
AB - Open source software (OSS) development communities are typically very specialised, on the one hand, and experience high turnover, on the other. Combination of specialization and turnover can cause parts of the system implemented in a certain programming language to become unmaintainable, if knowledge of that language has disappeared together with the retiring developers.
Inspired by measures of linguistic diversity from the study of natural languages, we propose a method to quantify the risk of not having maintainers for code implemented in a certain programming language. To illustrate our approach, we studied risks associated with different languages in Emacs, and found examples of low risk due to high popularity (e.g., C, Emacs Lisp); low risk due to similarity with popular languages (e.g., C++, Java, Python); or high risk due to both low popularity and low similarity with popular languages (e.g., Lex). Our results show that methods from the social sciences can be successfully applied in the study of information systems, and open numerous avenues for future research.
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-319-03260-3_34
DO - 10.1007/978-3-319-03260-3_34
M3 - Conference contribution
SN - 978-3-319-03259-7
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science
SP - 391
EP - 404
BT - Social Informatics (5th International Conference, SocInfo 2013, Kyoto, Japan, November 25-27, 2013. Proceedings)
A2 - Jatowt, A.
A2 - Lim, E.-P.
A2 - Ding, Y.
PB - Springer
CY - Berlin
T2 - conference; 5th International Conference on Social Informatics; 2013-11-25; 2013-11-27
Y2 - 25 November 2013 through 27 November 2013
ER -